False canopies on fighters work, one almost killed me
This effect is extremely apparent in r&#x2F;c aircraft especially at long range or high-speed passes.<p>Without some other contextual clues (perceived motion against clouds, etc) it&#x27;s extremely difficult to determine whether the plane is rolled 180 degrees and how it&#x27;s moving.  And especially as it turns through the degrees of shadow etc it&#x27;s very easy to have the plane appear visually different from what you expect.<p>I&#x27;ve definitely flown some sailplanes etc (up high!) or played around with long-duration gliding on my old electric flying wings.  And the farther out you go the easier it is to lose perspective.  Losing perspective down at ground level (eg you got way too far out for a landing attempt) is usually game over.<p>The other one is it&#x27;s very difficult to pick off in snap-vision situations.  You rolled the plane and lost it (my wing would do 3-4 a second) and have a snap second to pick up the reorientation etc and yoink upwards.  And that&#x27;s probably similar in principle to fast-pass snap recognition workloads for fighters.<p>I had some fairly fast electric wings for the day, they&#x27;d hit 50-70 mph with some of the early neodymium brushless motors from Mega (the 16&#x2F;15&#x2F;4 and 16&#x2F;15&#x2F;3) and high-discharge 50A NiMH packs.  Those things cooked, I added extra spars to help avoid harmonic flapping from overspeed etc. I liked to do soaring (one of the wings was originally an unpowered cliff soaring design) so I definitely dressed my wings up in high-vis designs (contrasting top&#x2F;bottom with reflective in some parts, distinctive pattern on each).  That largely solved the problem especially as I gained experience etc.  Just ask the enemy nicely to do that, I guess. ;)<p>(but honestly that might be a good way to train, use a rc model at extreme distance with a reflective pattern and have the instructor spin it and the student has to reorient themselves and recover it (or push a  flight stick in the direction you&#x27;d respond for that orientation).  Practice an extreme form of learning to ignore silhouettes and orient from the other cues, and then slow it down to what planes can actually do without the visual aid?)<p>But yes that orientation illusion is really disconcerting and easy to fall into.  Is it right side up, or turned and now it&#x27;s upside down, etc.  If you can&#x27;t visually track features accurately you lose one of the degrees of freedom in the model.  And you can often brute-force it with concentration and will... but if you lose it, the movement is gonna confuse the hell out of you for a couple seconds until your mental model reorients.  Literally a visual gimbal lock.