Originally Posted by
SNS3Guppy
I'm a diagnosed, long term severe chronic asthmatic.
Asthma is caused by various triggers. Mine is exercise, and illness. If I get sick, I get really sick, and am very susceptible to upper respiratory and lower respiratory complications. . . .
In the airplane, I don't exercise. I don't do aerobics (though sometimes in some types of flying, is certainly feels differently). If I'm getting sick, I don't fly anyway. So those are non-issues to flying.
And this explains everything from a
military perspective.
There is no military aircraft where it can be said that you will have no physical exertion prior to flight.
Even a sedate AT may require the crew to change jets at short notice and that can entail a fair amount of bag heaving and fast walking. On the sharp pointy things or egg beaters running from crew-room to jet or down the flight line can be an every day occurrence.
War Story:
Once our jet went U/S. We jumped into the spare and got airborne on time. The spare however had been over a mile away, we had had to shut down the primary, offload all our kit, jump in the crew bus, run to the spare where a backup crew had everything burning and turning, doors closed, taxy, strap in, and off. IIRC we got our pulse rates steady and sweat dried after about 20 minutes.