I’m watching a really interesting show called Showdown: Air Combat on netflix. They recreate dogfights that pilots were in and the pilots describe the turns and evasive maneuvers they are in.
I wonder when they are concentrating so hard how they are able to remember when their life is on the line, their altitude, the J-turns they they take etc, all while going 600+mph.
Do fighter pilots have to have excellent memories, and are they trained to remember their dogfights? Have there been pilots who can’t remember much about their dogfights? I think the stress would be unimaginable and it would be hard to remember details.
I’m sure the pilots remember situations and their responses to those situations. If someone was on your tail with an armed missile aiming at you, I’m pretty sure you’d remember what you did to clear that threat. You’d probably remember any maneuver(s) you performed to gain an advantage over a threat too. I don’t think it would be that hard to recall.
I’ve wondered the same thing after watching the show “dogfights”. I believe that after a mission they fill out reports of some kind while the mission is fresh in their mind. On “dogfights” they sometimes mention the name of the enemy pilot, which could only be possible if someone was comparing reports long after the war.
By WWII, there was often film being shot from the plane wing during missions (the tv show Baa Baa Black Sheep showed some of the archival wing footage mixed in with dog fight sequences, and Butch O’Hare’s famous downing of 8 Zeroes wasn’t believed by his shipmates until the footage was reviewed).
There might be some embellishment in their stories, but the memory of events that occur when someone is trying to shoot you down in a dogfight gets burned into the brain. Pilots need a strong awareness of what they’re doing in flight. That and the adrenaline fortified memories would combine with their reports and subsequent retellings to form a vivid story.
Yeah, I have to say, while I certainly have not been in any scenarios like a dogfight, the few high-stress fight-or-flight type scenarios I have encountered do sort of endilibly etch themselves in your memory. It like time slows down and everything becomes extra-clear, at least for me. Now, whether my memories are an accurate account of what happened, I can’t say for sure, but they do seem like it.
Yes, it also isn’t as if they are flying around randomly and trying to remember every individual detail from scratch either. They are executing trained tactics that make a lot more sense when you are the one doing the flying as opposed to someone watching it from the outside. It is the same thing for anyone that trains for similar things like police car chases. They already know the roads, the landmarks, and the tactics they need to use in that environment. That makes it much easier to recall after the fact. They just have to use their mental map that already has most of the key information and add the relevant details. Granted, it is harder to recall for a dogfight rather than a police chase because it is a 3-D environment but the idea is the same.
And it’s not like the TV show is the first time he’s told the story; more like the 5,000th. We all have our best stories and they get refined, clarified and stripped of inconsistencies with each telling, until barely a single word is changed from one telling to the next. The guys on those shows are simply reciting a tale they have mastered though decades of performances.
As a former online sim fighter pilot, I can attest that the most engaging dogfights certainly do engrave themselves indelibly on your memory-I can still remember several of them from 20+ years ago.
At 72 years old, he still remembers virtually every game he ever played. The players, the plays, the weather, the score, the hits - everything. We sit & chat for hours a week about the old days, and it’s just amazing to watch. Whatever path we’re on, if it leads to a person, or a game, or a city, he just pulls the details out and lays them on us.
“I remember in the 1964 Pro Bowl…”
I think we all remember a lot about our past if we try; certain people, bad dates, good dates - a lot of things - but I’ve never seen anyone with the memory that he does.
Perhaps it’s common among high-level, high-performing individuals like top athletes and top pilots. That, plus telling the same stories for 40 years!
I recall, years ago, reading about about Jimmy Connors. The writer remarked that Connors could remember every point of every match he ever played. If any point was important to a discussion Connors could recount it shot by shot, even down to details about the shhots he had chosen to play.
The stress helps, the recounting helps, and also keep in mind that these days (not sure how it was before my generation), one of the tools used by instructors to train aviators is step-by-step post-flight walkthroughs where the student’s actions are analyzed. By the time you’re winged, you have a pretty good sense of exactly what you did in the cockpit for the last hour or two.
I know a boxer, who could have been a contender (middleweight, cue Brando) in the 50’s.
I swear, just like the Simon and Garfunkle song, he remembers, with passion, every blow. And analysis of the final clinch when the fight was called, when he would’ve gone to the deciding match before the Title.
In fact, the phenomenon probably applies in any experience in which you are an expert, or at least completely familiar with the context. What you notice and consider and perceive are not the same items, structures and paradigms that others outside or less engaged do. It’s related to the observation that the fish doesn’t perceive the water. Also, I’d say it’s related to the memories of some expert baseball players. They can tell you pitch sequences from particular games, for instance.
Certainly British fighter pilots were required to write out a combat report (if combat took place) as soon as they got back. And if several patrols took place in the day, as they frequently did in 1940, the next encounter wiped most of the details of the previous one which was why the officer detailed with collecting this material (most of which is preserved for posterity) badgered them to do it immediately.
My sister’s late husband was a fighter pilot, beginning in Korea and ending in Viet Nam. I believe he could remember perfectly every combat situation that involved him.
IIUC cameras in fighters were activated when the machine guns were used. Not all was recorded but it is clear that specially in dogfights it was fairly easy to check if the reports from the pilots were accurate.
That is a very powerful advantage IMHO because I do take into account research that continues to point how unreliable human memory is. The advantage pilots (and sportsmen specially) have is that most also reviewed their films eventually, and physical evidence on the planes and the pilots themselves also helped a lot into making the memories of the pilots to be more reliable than other people under stressful circumstances that do not have access to recorded evidence.