SPRING 2009

Extreme Training at 30,000 Feet

by Robert Ross

Caroline Brozovich’s fingers and lips have turned blue-grey, her movements are sluggish, and her eyes half-shut, as though she’s peering through a fog. The oxygen around her is now as thin as the air at 30,000 feet, the cruising altitude for jet aircraft. If Brozovich were piloting an airliner, she and her passengers would be minutes away from serious trouble.

But Brozovich is a flight student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, the world’s leading aviation and aerospace educational institution, and her instructor has just handed her an oxygen mask.

They are inside the university’s new High Altitude Laboratory, a modern high-tech facility for teaching aspiring pilots how to recognize the symptoms of oxygen loss at high altitudes. Embry-Riddle is the first university in the United States to acquire the unique lab for the purpose of high-altitude hypoxia awareness training. The lab can accommodate 8-10 people per training session.

The laboratory was designed for use in Embry-Riddle’s Flight Physiology course, to teach the causes and symptoms of hypoxia, a shortage of oxygen in the brain and blood. An insidious threat to pilots, altitude-induced hypoxia is often caused by loss of cabin pressurization.

Research by the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration has demonstrated the need for high-altitude training. Hypoxia was the cause of a Greek Helios Airways crash that killed 121 people in 2005 and the crash that killed golfer Payne Stewart and five others aboard a Learjet in 1999.

“Hypoxia affects people differently, and the rate of onset varies for each person,” says Glenn Harmon, an aerospace physiologist and assistant professor of aeronautical science at Embry-Riddle. “Symptoms can include tunnel vision, nausea, euphoria, dizziness, tingling, fatigue, and loss of coordination. This laboratory is an ideal place for pilots to learn to recognize their own symptoms.”

Embry-Riddle chose to adopt the normobaric technology, which reduces oxygen content and is safer and less costly, rather than the military’s hypobaric chamber technology, which reduces air pressure.

As air machines extract oxygen from the enclosure creating a hypoxic environment inside, students perform cognitive, motor, and flight tasks under the supervision of an instructor. As soon as they experience the warning signs of hypoxia, students don oxygen masks like those required in airline cockpits before their decision making becomes clouded or they become incapacitated.

The university expects to train up to 500 flight students per year in the High Altitude Laboratory. Embry-Riddle’s aeronautical science (professional pilot) degree program is the nation’s largest.