Somatogravic illusion affects all pilots, and it continues to kill them in five specific situations. Part of the reason Somatogravic Illusion is so successful in killing pilots is that it is rarely taught to pilots. And to help you learn about how it kills pilots and the five specific situations for where you should be alert for it, I've created a YouTube video on somatogravic illusion, complete with animations I created.
The root cause is our senses lie to us. Specifically, the utricles in our inner ears can't distinguish between when our head is tilted backwards from when our body is being accelerated forward. That's usually not a problem in the daytime, as we can look outside and see the horizon and use that additional information to confirm whether the pitch up feeling we’re getting from the utricle is real or not.
Unfortunately, Somatogravic Illusion can sneak up on you and kill you so quickly… that you’ll have no idea why you just died. And yet avoiding Somatogravic Illusion is easy. And fortunately, the circumstances under which it occurs are relatively few, and they’re easy to identify ahead of time. And that’s why for the vast majority of our lives, Somatogravic Illusion is not a problem, and we don’t pay any attention to it. But, if you take away a clear view of the horizon, you no longer have a way to distinguish between whether the pitch up sensation you’re getting from the utricle is truly a pitch up climb, or is linear acceleration with no climb.
Here some of the situations that are known to generate somatogravic illusion, giving you a false sense of pitching up when you’re accelerating, and a false sense of pitching down when you’re decelerating.
1. Taking off at night over a dark area with few lights.
2. Taking off in zero zero or very low visibility conditions
3. Starting a missed approach
4. When landing as the aircraft decelerates in the flare, or on the ground
5. Possibly in gliders, especially following cable breaks on winch launches
In the first three cases, the solution is to trust your instruments, not your body sensations, and manipulate the controls until the instruments show you’re at the correct attitude, which might be straight and level, or even a normal climb, depending upon what’s needed for a particular phase of flight. In the last two cases, you should be able to overcome somatagravic illusion by looking at outside references and manipulating the controls appropriately.
But please watch the YouTube video. I created two animations with simplified versions of the construction of the utricle, which is easy to remember once you've seen it. And if you haven't done so already Please subscribe to my YouTube channel.
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