losing consciousness

[jireland607]

I was flying a night sortie when it happened, took me a minute to realise what was wrong, I thought the game had crashed. This Sim never fails to amaze me by its detail.

[Kenan]

And while we're all trying to figure out how to stay alert at 20k, Israelis have already found a solution. Too bad there's no "Viagra" switch implemented in DCS:

 

Israel Mulls Viagra-Style Drugs to Keep Pilots Up (Updated)

 

 

• By Noah Shachtman
  
• February 8, 2008 |
  
• 9:57 am |
  
• Categories: Army and Marines, Israel, Science!
  
• 
  

 

Air Forces all around the world drug their pilots, to keep ‘em alert. A new Israeli military report says the "Viagra family of drugs" might be the best pills for the job. Seriously.

"Military researchers believe the ingredients that allow improved blood flow for men suffering from sexual problems may help flyers operating at very high altitudes," the Times of London reports.

The proposal, to be presented to the air force by a retired general, developed from a study by Israeli doctors among mountain climbers scaling Mount

Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, according to

Bamahaneh

(“On the Army Base”), an official military magazine. The study found that tadalafil, the active ingredient in Cialis, a Viagra-like antiimpotence drug, helped climbers to ward off fatigue and dizziness at greater heights.

With combat pilots operating hi-tech equipment in low-pressure environments, doctors believe the drug could enhance their operational abilities.

“The Viagra family of drugs is considered effective in these conditions because when there is a long shortage in oxygen it leads to high blood pressure in the lungs, and the drugs help fight that,” a military medical officer told the weekly magazine.

UPDATE: There’s just one teeny-tiny problem with the plan, as our friend B.W. Jones reminds us: Viagra, Cialis, and the like might just make you go blind in the long run.

 

For decades, the armed forces around the globe have tried all sorts of ways to keep its soldiers and pilots awake. During World War II, American, German, Japanese, and British troops were all issued rations of amphetamines. In the early days of the Afghanistan war, these "go pills"

were blamed for a particularly ugly "friendly fire" incident. A newer drug, modafinil, is now being pushed in the U.S. military as a safer alternative.

DARPA, the Pentagon’s way-out research arm, is funding scientific studies into more exotic answers to combat the effects of sleeplessness. Columbia University psychologists, working under a DARPA

grant, are keeping people awake for 48 hours straight — and then zapping their brains with focused magnetic waves, to keep their cognitive capacities intact. The researchers recently published a study showing that the transcranial magnetic stimulation was able to "improve the working memory performance" of the sleep-deprived. Lexicon

Genetics has found genetic targets in mice that seem to make sleep itself more restorative, enhancing learning and memory. And Wisconsin professor Giulio Tononi is breeding a strain of fruit flies that gets by on just a third the normal amount of sleep.

So, which is scarier: Fruit flies bred to pull all-nighters, or fruit flies pumped up with Cialis?

 

 

Source:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/02/israel-mulls-vi/