The focus here is on aviation medicine and the relationship between the male body and technology. Beginning with the first flight at the dawn of the twentieth century in Kittyhawk, there was envisioned a harmony between the body of the pilot and the machine which he was piloting, with the machine an extension of the body. However, by the jet age, the developments in aviation technology with planes that could now fly at supersonic speeds as well as increasingly sophisticated equipment, meant that the agency of the pilot was curtailed, the human body now subordinated to the dictates of the machine. And drawing upon the work of David Edgerton that asserts the militaristic – and hence gendered – use of the aeroplane in the first half of the twentieth century, it was the male body that was the focus of aviation medicine. It is within this context that Ernst Jokl’s work in aviation medicine can be situated. Drawing upon the pre-war studies of German scientists, Jokl’s research addressed human responses to the conditions of modern aviation: extreme velocity and altitude. He demonstrated the imperfections of the senses and of a body wholly out of its natural environment. As a result, the cognition and physicality of the pilot was mediated by technology with pilots having to be trained to subordinate their instincts to the machine and its instrumentation. Flight, which was initially perceived as a legacy of knighthood exemplifying the actions of an individual warrior in anonymous, modern warfare, now served to limit the sense of the individual and, with it, an assertive masculinity.