Improving Flight One Breath at a Time

NASA is doing complex flight research to look at how pilots breathe to make it safer for them to fly. The NASA Engineering and Safety Center launched the Pilot Breathing Assessment program in 2019 and tapped NASA Armstrong to fly high-performance aircraft flights to better understand how flight conditions may cause pilots to experience a physiological episode during flight. The first phase of the research has involved five pilots, four aircraft, two aircrew equipment configurations and approximately 90 hours of flight at NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center in California.