Военный авиационный врач: роль и задачи

Military occupation

A flight surgeon is a military medical officer practicing in the clinical field of aviation medicine. Although the term "flight surgery" is considered improper by purists, it may occasionally be encountered. Flight surgeons are physicians (MDs or DOs) who serve as the primary care physicians for a variety of military aviation personnel on special duty status — e. g., pilots, Flight Officers, navigators/Combat Systems Officers, astronauts, missile combat crews, air traffic controllers, UAV operators and other aircrew members, both officer and enlisted. In the United States Department of Defense, the Army, Navy, and Air Force all train and utilize flight surgeons. In addition to serving as primary care for military members on special duty status and their families, the U. S. Department of Defense uses flight surgeons for a variety of other tasks. Aviation medicine is essentially a form of occupational medicine and flight surgeons are tasked with the responsibility of maintaining the military's strict medical standards, especially the even stricter standards that apply to those on flying, controlling or jump (airborne) status. In the U. S military, flight surgeons are trained to fill general public health and occupational and preventive medicine roles, and are only infrequently "surgeons" in an operating theater sense. Flight surgeons are typically rated aviators on flight status (i. e., they log flight hours in military aircraft as a crewmember), but are not required to be rated or licensed pilots, naval flight officers, or navigators/CSOs. They may be called upon to provide medical consultation as members of an investigation board into a military or NASA aviation or spaceflight mishap. Occasionally, they may serve to provide in flight care to patients being evacuated via aeromedical evacuation, either fixed wing or rotary wing. The civilian equivalent of the flight surgeon is the Aviation Medical Examiner (AME). Some civilian AMEs have training similar to that of military flight surgeons, and some are either retired military flight surgeons or actively serving flight surgeons in a military Reserve Component.

The roots of aviation medicine extend back to the earliest scientific discoveries of gas laws and the makeup of Earth's atmosphere as these factors relate to the human body. As aviation progressed from lighter than air balloons to fixed wing controlled flight to spaceflight, the disciplines of medicine and physiology were required to track with each technological advance. Physicians and physiologists, such as John Jeffries (1745 1819) and Paul Bert (1833 1886), conducted experiments on humans in flight and documented the body's response to these physiologic stressors. However, it would not be until airplanes were first used in war that the office of the first flight surgeon was established.

The term "flight surgeon" originated in the early months of 1918 when the U. S. Air Medical Service of the U. S. Army collaborated with two civilian aviation organizations—the Aero Club of America and the Aerial League of America—to manage problems of medical screening and standards for U. S. military aviators. The term is especially associated with Colonel (later Brigadier General) Theodore C. Lyster (the first Chief Surgeon, Aviation Section, U. S. Signal Corps, U. S. Army), and with Major Isaac H. Jones. These two officers proposed the organization of a pioneering "Care of the Flier" unit in June 1918. The original intent was for the military and the Surgeon General to understand what was causing the high flight mishap rate. Shortly after the appointment of the first flight surgeons, research and experience led to a dramatic improvement in aircrew health as well as a significant raising of the entry medical standards for all aircrew. The early flight surgeons found that the Army's practice of assigning officers to flight duty who were not physically qualified for infantry or cavalry duty was improper. Because of the G forces, risk of spatial disorientation, and risk of hypoxia encountered in the aviation environment, among other challenges, early flight surgeons found that aviation personnel must be scrupulously healthy and well trained in the basics of aerospace physiology.

The role of flight surgeons continued to mature and expand as the U. S. faced World War II. The 1941 movie Dive Bomber, although focused on Naval Aviation, highlighted the role of the flight surgeon just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and demonstrated how solving the problems of hypoxia at altitude would reduce the aircraft mishap rate. During World War II, the head of the U. S. Army Air Forces, General of the Army (later General of the Air Force) Henry 'Hap' Arnold, directed all flight surgeons in the Army Air Forces to fly regularly with their patients in order to better understand the aviation environment. Consequently, to this day, their successor U. S. Air Force Flight Surgeons are considered "aeronautically rated" aircrew members who receive flight pay and who are required to fly a certain number of hours monthly. The same policy applies to Army Flight Surgeons and to Naval Flight Surgeons, the latter who are considered "aeronautically designated" officers like their Naval Aviator and Naval Flight Officer counterparts. Strict racial segregation in the U. S. Army required the development of separate black flight surgeons to support the operations and training of the Tuskegee Airmen in 1941 and continued in the U. S. Army Air Forces throughout World War II. Following the establishment of an independent U. S. Air Force and the racial integration of all the U. S. armed forces following World War II, this separation was discontinued.

Flight Surgeons were still utilized but only in garrison environments. During the Vietnam War, USAF flight surgeons were utilized on flights.

The training requirements for military flight surgeons in countries other than the United States are different—for example, in the United Kingdom, Aviation Medicine is considered a sub specialty of Occupational Medicine rather than a fully separate specialty. Thus, Royal Air Force, Royal Navy and British Army specialists in Aviation Medicine are usually required to be specialists in Occupational Medicine before undertaking the specialised training in Aviation Medicine.