So today was the famed altitude chamber.  Which was actually pretty fun, which is what I expected.  For those of you that don't know anything about altitude chamber rides.  It's basically a large steel box where they artificially change the air pressure inside of the chamber to simulate high altitude environments.  The whole time you breath through a regulator similar to the one that you will find in high performance aircraft.

Back to the ride.  On ours they took us up to FL350 which is 35,000 feet in the air to test out our pressure breathing.  At that altitude breathing 100% oxygen isn't enough to keep you from passing out so they have to add pressure to the air they are delivering to you so that it counteracts the lack of air pressure in the ambient air.  No I'm not going into a long explanation of why you have too, it's long and boring, if you want one then leave a comment or give me a call, I have a test on all that shit next week so I'll actually know why.  Anyways, because of the added pressure in the oxygen you are breathing you have to do pressure breathing, which means you have to let the air fill up your lungs without any work, but then forcibly exhale.  Its backwards from what you normally do, try it.  After we did that for a few minutes we dropped back down to FL250 where we figured out what our individual symptoms of hypoxia are.  Hypoxia is the medical term used for lack of oxygen in the body.  This may happen in the aircraft if something breaks in our oxygen system and we don't know about it.  Knowing what your symptoms are can help you figure out there is a problem before you are to "dumb" to realize it.

To figure out your symptoms they have you unstrap your mask at FL250 and breathe without regulator oxygen, just the ambient air in the chamber.  Just so you know most airlines turn on the oxygen in the aircraft at 10,000 feet, so that you don't get hypoxic.  Gives you a bit of perspective.  Let me tell you the symptoms for hypoxia come on pretty quick.  Mine is a feeling of euphoria and tingling in the extremities.  Plus your brain becomes sluggish and can't do any complicated procedures.  This gets worse the longer you go without the regulator oxygen.  If you go on long enough you are no longer usefully conscious and are just sitting there staring before passing out.  Which would be bad if you were flying an aircraft.   So yeah we did that and then they depressurized the altitude chamber and had small groups go through a rapid decompression.  This helps you recognize the situation if it ever happens in your cockpit.  Good stuff to know.

Other then the altitude chamber we had some more CAI's (computer aided instructions) on systems 1.  Next week is going to be busy as hell so I'm trying to get my study on now.  We have three tests (aerospace physiology, land survival, and systems 1) plus a sim next week so yeah I'm going to have my nose in a book all weekend.  I'll let you know how I did each time I take a test, but other then that don't expect much information because I'll have just enough time to relax for a few minutes and eat dinner, before getting ready for the test the next day.  Hope you all have a good weekend!