-
Please take a moment and update your account profile. If you have an updated account profile with basic information on why you are on Air Warriors it will help other people respond to your posts. How do you update your profile you ask?
Go here:
Edit Account Details and Profile
BCA Navadmin
- Thread starter CommodoreMid
- Start date
Well I have a couple months still to find where that is written down, or perhaps, where it isn't
Doing a rebaseline can potentially be beneficial when you get out. Yes, it might be a little money (if you're eligible), but perhaps more importantly, it may help push you to a threshold to be eligible for "better" VA benefits if you're otherwise pretty healthy.
While I have ranted here before about basic VA care, I have appreciated the ability to pop over to an urgent care to get lab tests several times this year, at no cost to me. (And no, the tests were not for gonorrhea).
While I have ranted here before about basic VA care, I have appreciated the ability to pop over to an urgent care to get lab tests several times this year, at no cost to me. (And no, the tests were not for gonorrhea).
“Kidney infection?”
Make sure it’s all documented, and keep copies of the old and new baseline. The VA will try tell you your hearing is fine.
Curious about your experience on that. My understanding is that service connected hearing loss is assessed from original baseline thresholds, and you won't get a rating unless your hearing loss is fairly severe. The reason Occ Health wants to rebaseline is so they can assess recent trends to see if there's something in your hearing protection approach that can be tweaked, which isn't all that useful for those of us in aircraft already wearing all the available PPE.
The military needs to invest in noise cancelling headset technology for fliers.
Maybe. I'm later 40s, 2.5k hours, mostly in helps, lots of time on CVN flight deck, and I still get mostly -5 dB across the hearing exam. I've been wearing basic (non-molded) CEPs since 2009.
If there's data to show noise canceling beats properly fitted double-protection, then I guess. I certainly think helo aircrewmen and flight deck personnel are more at risk than most aviators. I also suspect there's a genetic component to hearing loss.
I'm perhaps not up to speed on all the physics, but is noise cancellation applicable to hearing protection, or is it more for crew comfort and being able to hear ICS and the radio? Is phase cancellation as effective as attenuation in preventing hearing damage? Also, WRT to jet noise, the worst environments seem to be outside the cockpit, I.E. flight deck crews, etc.
To continue the threadjack, flew with a guy back in 2020 who decided to not "anticipate" the beeps on the hearing exam for his final flight physical. Turns out his hearing shift was so signifcant that he was med-down from it. He had a difficult time getting his up-chit and caused him much stress before he retired.
Obviously if your hearing sucks, make sure it's documented. Just be aware of how it works.
Obviously if your hearing sucks, make sure it's documented. Just be aware of how it works.
I think that's the official, more immediate reason. I I failed a baseline while I was in flight school and, like you said, I was doing everything I could do, but they did evaluate. I was advised to schedule the retest coming off a weekend so I could "rest" my ears. I passed with no problems. In this particular case, it wasn't them waving their hands saying I was fine since I truly was, but at least there was some counseling.
But... Your hearing stuff goes in with your VA packet. My baseline and my trends were submitted. Like IKE, I had minimal hearing loss, so I didn't have to fight the VA on that front, but I did have chronic tinnitus. At the practitioner level, it was handled professionally and she did all the hearing tests, but also asked appropriate questions about the tinnitus. At the review level, I don't know how in depth they went, but they ended up approving me for 10%, which I'd argue is fair for my condition and what my paperwork said. Maybe you could argue 20% since I did have loss, albeit small.
Along the lines of what you're saying, I think the type of exposure matters. With around ~3.3K hours of turbine time at the time of retirement, I had minimal loss, but more than 1K of that was sitting behind a PT-6, and that absolutely caused significant tinnitus. Once I stopped flying that and went back to helos the tinnitus subsided (but didn't disappear).
But there's other variables too. My helo helmet, as crappy as it is for NVGs, fit me really well for hearing, along with using foamies 100% of the time. My fixed-wing helmet wasn't as good (also mitigated with foamies). I'm not sure if its fit was truly causing more damage than would have happened anyway, though, just because that engine was so damn loud and running at 100% 80 percent of the time.
I agree, I would guess the crewmen take more of the brunt of helo flying with that tranny over their head all the time.
This came up in a general aviation article semi-recently, but I can't find it. The article posited that there isn't a lot of data to show if it truly helps to reduce damage from the external source. After some curious googling, The bulk of what I could find was more focused on either Airpods (it helps you turn down the music, which helps reduce damage from the internal source) or wearing NC headphones during commercial travel, which I think we'd all agree isn't anywhere near comparable to the environment we've all worked in.
So I guess...¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't disagree, but they'd need to harden it. There was a Det at my first squadron that took out some NC tech on deployment with them. I'm not sure how or what they bought to fit in the HGU-84, but apparently someone rigged something up. They said it died within a month or two due to the SPY.
I'm not smart enough to know how easy an engineering problem that is to solve without adding too much weight, but it's there.
This kinda reminds me of back pain issues in my community. I have none. At just a few weeks shy of 42 (and still actively flying the navy jets/doing BFM/etc), I have absolutely zero back pain, now or ever. I wouldn't dare say that will continue indefinitely, but I feel like everyone I knew when we were in our mid-late 30's had it really bad. I know a person who won't ever fly again because of it. The only specific difference I can figure between me and them, is that I didn't ever once try to mix flying F/A-18's with crossfit. Or maybe it is just fortunate spinal genetics on my part, but I doubt that. I am very much susceptible to >40 weight gain/dad bod, and everything else (other than balding......I don't have any of that, and still get carded buying alcohol at a lot of places)
You may also have good genetics in core strength. I've found that when I do the work, my back pain greatly reduces when I concentrate on building core strength. I have not been doing that recently and I can feel it after an hour in the aircraft at work.