It can strike without warning, robbing a pilot of the ability to think clearly or react as he or she flies through the air at supersonic speeds.

“I was gasping for air and got a little light headed,” said Navy Lt. Pat Bookey, a pilot assigned to Air Test and Evaluation Squadron (VX) 23. “It was pretty eye-opening because my symptoms don’t really present themselves gradually and my blood oxygen level gets pretty low before I actually know it is happening. The symptoms hit me pretty hard.”

The culprit was hypoxia, more commonly known as oxygen deprivation, and symptom recognition is key to combating its disastrous effects, which can include a decrease in mental performance, delayed response time, diminished basic motor skills and loss of consciousness.

Bookey was one of several F/A-18 pilots who recently participated in a training event on April 16 that combined NAVAIR’s Manned Flight Simulator (MFS) with a Reduced Oxygen Breathing Device (ROBD) simulator. The purpose was to show pilots what hypoxia really feels like in the cockpit during task-heavy exercises and to emphasize what life-saving steps they should take if it strikes, such as accessing the emergency oxygen supply and landing the aircraft.

“When a pilot’s workload is very high, the ability to identify hypoxia symptoms is reduced,” said Marine Corps Maj. Tobias van Esselstyn, VX-23 director of safety and standardization. “We combined the ROBD with a high fidelity [realistic] simulator, put F/A-18 pilots in their own environment, gave them a task that is very hard to do and got them hypoxic at the same time.”

With traditional hypoxia training, a pilot uses an ROBD while flying a simulator at a computer. While informative, this approach does not require the same workload experienced during flight and results in a higher awareness of symptoms such as light-headedness or reduced motor control. The new combined training demands much more of the pilot’s attention and delays the awareness of hypoxia symptoms, creating a more realistic environment.

Lt. Cmdr. Corey Little, an aeromedical safety officer for Naval Test Wing Atlantic, oversaw the training and recorded each pilot’s specific symptoms.

“It is good to see based on body type, physical makeup and physical fitness levels how each individual responds to a decrement in oxygen,” Little said. “By doing the hypoxia train