Chesty Morgan wrote:
Wrong, they have a longer PEPT once hypoxic.
The paper mentioning PEPT didn't give any evidence to support a beneficial effect of smoking, and the paper you referred to originally (Yoneda and Watanabe) and I was referring to didn't mention PEPT... or in the abstract mention any protective effect of smoking in terms of reducing the impairment due to hypoxia.
You haven't yet posted any links to papers suggesting a protective effect of smoking (though I follow the logic as to why chronic smoking-induced hypoxia could improve performance).
The other thing worth mentioning is that carbon monoxide poisoning largely isn't about hypoxia but about carbon monoxide binding to Cytochrome C Oxidase in the mitochondria (theoretically equivalent levels of hypoxia and Carbon Monoxide levels in terms of reduced oxygen availability have very different prognoses in terms of long-term neurological impairment). How this relates to smoking and flying at altitude I don't know, but it would take a lot to persuade me that smoking is beneficial, and you haven't posted one pertinent article yet.