Are Air Force Pilots’ Cancer Cases Linked To Cockpit Radiation? Calls Rise For Studies.

Too little is known about direct links between cockpit radiation and a variety of cancers in U.S. Air Force aircrews. The director of the USAF Operational Test Team for the F-35 says, “We’re just starting to tease out some of the data on that and it’s not very encouraging.”

At next week’s annual symposium for the Society of Experimental Test Pilots Colonel Dan “Animal” Javorsek will give a presentation on the relationship between exposure to radar, avionics and other emissions in the cockpits of fighter aircraft and a rising incidence of cancers among active and retired Air Force pilots.

Col. Javorsek is a test pilot himself and the current commander of Detachment 6 at the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center (AFOTEC) at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada as well as director of the USAF F-35 Operational Test Team.

He is also a cancer survivor. Diagnosed with testicular cancer while commanding a squadron in 2016, Javorsek underwent three surgeries and chemotherapy over several years. As he continued to serve, he began to seriously research possible causes for his illness.

When he joined DARPA as a program manager in 2018, he took the reins of the Agency’s Impact of Cockpit Electro-Magnetics on Aircrew Neurology (ICEMAN) program. ICEMAN was a two-year project aimed at determining whether radio waves and magnetic fields were harming pilots and interfering with their ability to operate their aircraft.

ICEMAN is now a Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program and last May Vermont-based Norwich University received a $371,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from DARPA to continue Phase II research.

The DARPA effort did not focus on cancer but a study released in 2020 by the Air Force’s School of Aerospace Medicine at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base did. Researchers tracked the health of approximately 35,000 active-duty airmen who flew fighter jets between 1970 and 2004, concluding they are at higher risk of developing prostate cancer and melanoma, with possible links to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and testicular cancer.

According to the School of Aerospace Medicine, the study results suggested the need for possible cancer prevention measures but were not enough to warrant broad policy changes for the Air Force fighter community. Javorsek, who assumed command of AFOTEC 6 in April 2021, continued to wonder about the effect of cockpit radiation from the newer 4th and 5th generation aircraft he and others have been flying since 2004.

The 2021 death of a friend and fellow USAF pilot from cancer inspired Col. Javorsek to establish a non-profit foundation called ACES and Eights to raise awareness for aircrew cancer. The name is a reference to the so-called “dead man’s hand” in poker – two-pair of black Aces and black Eights.

While the 2020 study dealt with cancer incidence in older aircrew, “We’re really trying to lean on the Air Force and DoD writ large to do a study similar to their study of the Vietnam era jets but for 4th gen and 5th gen airplanes,” Javorsek says.

Congress took note of the previous study and included some language in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) suggesting further investigation of the issue. Javorsek and others hope a bill pending in Congress – the Aviator Cancer Examination Study Act or ACES Act – sponsored by Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), a former USAF F-15/F-22 pilot, will impel the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Pentagon and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to study cancer and mortality in Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps aircrew members as well as aircraft support personnel.

“Congress has been poking at this for the last couple years,” Javorsek observes. “With it comes some incentive [to investigate] beyond the pilot community.”

Javorsek’s status as an active-duty commander and test pilot within the Air Force test community gives his advocacy an unusual and admirable quality. The lack of examination of the issue by DoD and the Air Force stem from institutional resistance, the reluctance of aircrew to call attention to themselves and commercial interest within the telecom sector, he says.

To illustrate the last, Javorsek maintains that when he managed ICEMAN for DARPA he couldn’t use the word “cancer” in association with the effort for political reasons. “The terms RF and cancer tend to be avoided by a whole host of folks to include the cellphone industry which doesn’t really want to see a lot of investigation.”

Most pilots he says are “anti-hypochondriacs,” reluctant to visit flight surgeons when uncertain about their health since “nothing good” comes from such visits with regard to their flight-status (even if only pushed back for a day) or their careers.

But speaking from personal experience, Javorek is adamant that, “When it comes to susceptibility to cancer, any time there’s anything that might remotely indicate that, they need to get it checked out.”

Pilots from all service branches might more readily take his advice if their leadership understood in some detail what may be happening.

The Radiation Fish Bowl

The 2020 study of aircrew cancer rates looked largely at those who flew older aircraft (F-100s. F-105s, F-4s, earlier F-15s and F-16s) with analog radars whose side and rear lobes flooded cockpits with radiation which propagated out through their canopies into the ambient environment.

But with the advent of stealth technology in the 1970s and 1980s, a determined effort to reduce the radar cross-section (RCS) and thus detectability of airplanes like the F-117, and more broadly aircraft across the Air Force fleet, led to a program called HAVE GLASS.

HAVE GLASS was a series of RCS reduction measures for the F-16. Among these was the addition of an indium-tin-oxide layer to the gold tinted cockpit canopy of the fighter. During development of the F-117 (code named HAVE BLUE) Lockheed designers recognized that an airplane’s RCS could be dramatically affected by reflections from the radar energy inside its canopy.

In addition to giving the F-117 and angular-shaped canopy, engineers infused it with a metallic layer, creating a Faraday Cage effect, preventing the waves entering the cockpit from the radar in the nose from bouncing back out into the atmosphere. The trick was later added to the F-16 and because it required little more than remanufactured canopies was applied across the USAF 4th and 5th generation aircraft fleets.

“The problem,” Javorsek says, “is that the same design for keeping [radiation] out, also keeps it in.”

The radar energy that ultimately worked its way out of Super Sabre or Phantom cockpits remains trapped inside newer fighters with HAVE GLASS canopy treatments. “You now basically have a retro-reflector for the radar that’s a couple of feet in front of you,” Col. Javorsek explains. “To make things worse, if you look at how a canopy is shaped and where a pilot sits, a quick ray-trace of the radar waves inside shows they end up focused on the pilot.”

In his talk on aircrew radiation and cancer Javorsek makes a simple line drawing to illustrate the problem and it points right at the pilot’s head. For the diminishing number of F-16s, F-15s, A-10s and others still flying with analog radars, the problem is likely worse than in those updated with digital Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radars. The older radars are more “leaky,” Javorsek thinks, with larger side and rear lobes.

The long-term impact of the particular type of non-ionizing radiation emitted in the cockpit and its relation to different strains of cancer is something that Javorsek theorizes is important as well.

But making educated guesses about the physics of in-cockpit radar radiation isn’t enough. Scientific measurement of the cockpit environment is necessary to assess possible neuro-medical and cancer impacts for aircrew. Sensors designed to measure the cockpit electromagnetic environment at different wavelengths and in different positions were devised for ICEMAN by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and other participants.

These can be employed in collecting data for cancer studies Javorsek hopes as well as in assessing the effects of other avionics including helmet-mounted displays which put radiation immediately in front of a pilot’s forehead and eyeballs.

“These helmet-mounted cueing systems are about as close as you can get to your brain, your cognitive function,” Javorsek says. “We know from some work from Caltech did for another DARPA program called RadioBio that there is a relationship between your brain waves and disturbances in the electromagnetic ambient environment.”

Questions about the impact of such devices on pilot ocular health are worth considering as well including temporary visual impairment. Ironically, the opportunity for broad studies of all of the above has diminished with the worrying decrease in flight hours pilots across military are dealing with. While they may be less exposed to cockpit radiation, under-experienced pilots are likely to suffer mortality related to operational and combat shortcomings.

As for his own advocacy and the bill now working its way through Congress, Javorsek is realistic. “These kinds of grassroots efforts, like this [bill] now in Congress are always at risk of not being followed through. Hopefully it makes it and provides some directive for DoD to produce a report and answer some of these questions.”

While he’s speaking and speaking out, he observes that there are things the Air Force and its pilots can do now.

“There may be ways we can change how we operate our [radar/avionics] systems, mitigation strategies we can put in place. What I tell young pilots when I’m talking to them about this is they should realize that they have an increased risk [for cancer] and get screened early. If you notice something or your wife notices something, get after it.”