@ Chesty Morgan:
Your post #42 seemed to be in response to my post #38 which only referenced Yoneda/Watanabe (who don't measure PEPT) so your objection that "Wrong, they have a longer PEPT
once hypoxic." confused me.
No, the other one did [provide evidence for the beneficial effects of smoking]
So the two papers we've discussed so far are:
Comparisons of altitude tolerance and hypoxia symptoms between nonsmokers and habitual smokers. - PubMed - NCBI
Aviat Space Environ Med. 1997 Sep;68(9)
07-11.
Comparisons of altitude tolerance and hypoxia symptoms between nonsmokers and habitual smokers.
Yoneda I1,
Watanabe Y.
You didn't link directly to this paper, but it's the one cited in the following paper as the source for the statement you cut and pasted.
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewc...&context=jhpee
Fletcher, James F. "Comparison of Simulated High Altitude Pilot Effective Performance Time Between Habitual Smokers and Non-Smokers."
Journal of Human Performance in Extreme Environments 7.2 (2003): 5.
Neither of the above articles mention any beneficial effect of smoking (reduced awareness of the onset of impairment is not a beneficial effect - quite the opposite). Neither show that smokers perform any better in an acute scenario (at least judging by the abstract, which is all I can access). So which is the 'other' article to which you refer?
Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
No, but given that you've posted evidence that smoking harms high altitude performance, and this is the accepted wisdom, then it's reasonable to ask you to put up or shut up before arguing in favour of something potentially very harmful.
Fletcher's paper measures performance after 40 minutes of exposure to a simulated pressure of 10000 feet. Whilst this is different from a sudden decompression/O2 supply failure scenario, if anything it's likely to be more relevant to the majority of pilots on this 'private flying' forum.
One comment I would make about Fletcher's paper is that it used student pilots as subjects who are likely to lie somewhere to the left of this curve showing how lung function changes with age/smoking:
I can see why they did this - though it would have been nice to see the breakdown of their subjects ages. But if they'd used 50 or 60 year old subjects, you might expect things to have looked even worse for the smokers.