Advanced Helmet for Maintainer Head and Hearing Protection

Improved head and hearing protection is required for aircraft maintainers working on a carrier flight deck during launch and recovery operations. The current head protection is inadequate in many aspects including impact protection, hearing protection, cleaning, comfort, and compatibility with night vision goggles (NVGs) and with chemical biological and radiological (CBR) equipment. Creare proposes a new maintainer helmet that meets the needs of today's flight deck crew. The helmet will use advanced materials and innovative fabrication techniques in a design that is based on a recently completed program of intensive testing on the effectiveness of hearing protection components in extreme noise environments. To be effective, the design must resolve the many competing requirements for comfort, weight, and compatibility without reducing hearing protection performance. Creare has the expertise, understanding, test result database, and test techniques to meet this challenge. In Phase I, we plan to design and fabricate a prototype helmet and to measure its impact and hearing protection performance. We will identify approaches to improve comfort, cooling, maintainability and usability, and implement select features in the prototype. In Phase II, we will complete the helmet design, and we will build and test a production version of the helmet.