WHEN IT COMES TO FLIGHT HELMETS, STEVE MIFSUD HAS SEEN IT ALL.


“I’ve seen helmets that were picked up by tornadoes and thrown a ways away,” Mifsud related. “Dogs have torn them up. They’ve even been used as bowling balls in Antarctica by bored researchers. And one was burned on one side in a wildfire.”


Mifsud has seen all this damage on various helmets because people chose to


repair them. So they


sent


their headgear to Evolution Helmets in Melbourne, Florida to get them restored to mint condition. “You see some crazy things,” concluded Mifsud, a helmet tech at Evolution Helmets.


Mifsud recalls totally refurbishing a


1990s-era Army helmet for one customer. About six months later, the pilot called Mifsud from the hospital to ask him to restore his helmet again – after he was a passenger in a rotorcraft that spun out and crashed. Luckily he walked away with a concussion and a dented helmet but nothing worse. “The helmet was up to OEM standards...and that definitely could have helped,” Mifsud said. The new styrofoam likely softened the impact when the g-force shoved the passenger’s head against the machine, he added.


Mifsud especially enjoys restoring military flight helmets – sometimes for museums, sometimes for veterans themselves, and sometimes for funerals. “Stuff like that means a lot,” he said. “I’ve had so many memorable conversations with veterans.”


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