When Your Senses Lie: Disorientation, Motion Sickness, Ears and Night Vision

Spatial disorientation is the inability to correctly sense attitude, altitude, or motion, and it usually strikes when outside references are lost and the inner ear sends false cues. Illusions such as the leans, the graveyard spiral, and the somatogravic illusion can convince a pilot of a turn or climb that is not happening; the only reliable cure is to trust the flight instruments over bodily sensation. Motion sickness comes from the eyes and inner ear disagreeing about motion, and it is worse with anxiety or turbulence — open the vents, fix your eyes on a point outside, and minimize head movement. The pressures inside the ears and sinuses must also equalize as you change altitude, which is hardest during descent; a pilot flying with a cold can suffer a painful ear or sinus block, so the best defense is not flying with significant congestion. Finally, night vision relies on the rod cells at the edges of the retina, which see no color and are missing at the very center of vision, so pilots use off-center viewing and allow about 30 minutes to fully dark-adapt.