Aircrew spend their working lives closer to the sun than almost anyone else, under canopies and windscreens designed for visibility rather than for blocking ultraviolet light. The question of whether that shows up in their medical records has been asked for decades. A study published this summer in Military Medicine gives one of the clearest answers yet, and it is more specific than the headlines suggest.

Researchers looked at 467,174 active-duty commissioned officers in the US Navy and Marine Corps between 2016 and 2024: 185,616 aviators and 281,558 non-aviators, doing the same job in the same organisation, differing mainly in whether they flew.

What the numbers do and do not say

The clear finding is about non-melanoma skin cancer, the keratinocyte carcinomas: basal cell and squamous cell. These are the common ones. They are rarely fatal, they are usually treated by excision, and they are strongly associated with cumulative lifetime ultraviolet exposure. Aviators had markedly more of them, and the gap survived adjustment for age.

The melanoma result is the one worth reading carefully, because it is where reporting tends to overreach. Melanoma was more common among aviators in raw numbers, but once the researchers accounted for age the difference no longer reached statistical significance. That is not the same as saying there is no effect. It means this dataset, over this period, could not demonstrate one.

Which sits awkwardly beside the large Department of Defense study completed in January 2023 and mandated by the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act. That one, covering 1992 to 2007, found aviators 24 per cent more likely to be diagnosed with any cancer and reported an 87 per cent higher melanoma risk, along with elevated thyroid and prostate cancer. Ground crew showed a smaller but real elevation of 3 per cent overall.

That is a fair summary of where the evidence stands. Different populations, different date ranges, different methods, different specific findings, pointing the same direction.

Why altitude makes the sun worse

Ultraviolet intensity rises with altitude because there is less atmosphere overhead to absorb it. Cloud tops and snow reflect it back upwards, so aircrew get it from below as well. And the transparency above their heads is engineered for optical clarity, structural strength and, on fast jets, for birdstrike resistance and radar signature. Screening ultraviolet is not the first thing it is asked to do, and older canopy materials in particular vary in how much UVA they let through.

Add the hours. A career aviator accumulates thousands of hours in that environment, and keratinocyte carcinoma is a cumulative-dose disease. You do not need an exotic mechanism to explain the finding; you need a lot of sunlight over a lot of years.

The British Journal of Dermatology on melanoma and skin cancer in airline pilots and cabin crew, the civil-aviation counterpart to this research.

What is actually being done about it

The study’s own conclusion is not dramatic, and that is to its credit. The authors point towards targeted occupational risk mitigation and enhanced dermatologic surveillance for aviation communities. In plain terms: sunscreen and skin checks.

That sounds trivial next to the seriousness of the subject, but for keratinocyte carcinoma it is close to the whole answer. These cancers are highly treatable when found early and unpleasant when found late. A community that is screened regularly and knows to look will have a very different outcome profile from one that is not, even with identical exposure.

If you fly for a living, or a great deal for pleasure, the practical reading of all this is unremarkable and worth doing anyway: use sunscreen on the parts of you the canopy does not shade, wear sunglasses that block UV, and have a dermatologist look at your skin periodically. None of that is aviation-specific advice. It is simply that aviators get a larger dose than most people of the thing that causes the problem.

And it is worth keeping the risk in proportion. These are elevated rates of a common and usually curable cancer in a population that is monitored more closely than almost any other. That is a manageable problem, provided it is treated as one.

Coverage of the earlier Department of Defense study into cancer rates among military pilots and ground crew.

A short piece on sun exposure risk for pilots and military personnel, and what reduces it.

Sources: Skin Cancer Incidence Among U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Aviators: A Retrospective Cohort Study, Military Medicine, 21 July 2026, via PubMed; Air & Space Forces Magazine on the 2023 Department of Defense aviator cancer study; US Navy and US Air Force imagery. This article is general information, not medical advice.