FlightSafety has the equipment now where you wear a mask similar to your regular oxygen mask. They can manipulate the mixture of oxygen to nitrogen so you simply wear it and they take you up or down in altitude. You really get to see the symptoms take hold of you and you're just along for the ride.
When I was down there for my initial last April they had the brochures out. When I asked about the extra cost because I was on a full service contract (what...no happy ending?!) it wouldn't cost anything more. I took the course which chopped a few hours out of an afternoon. The other guys from my company were in their own sim at the time so it was friday night, had no job and had nothin' better to do so I went and got hiiiiiiiiigh...altitude.
When you see it in the debriefing room on the monitor (Camera records your actions, mics record your voice and instant telemetry shows what your controls and the airplane are doing) its a sight to see.
Even filling out the worksheet they gave us before hand with some circles to draw, math problems to complete (like eagl said...2+2 doesn't equal 4 when you're hypoxic) and so forth.
Comparing an acclimitized mountain climber to your average joe pilot in an airplane isn't a fair thing. I wouldn't have a snowballs chance in hell of getting anywhere close to the summit without oxygen. Neither would 99.9999999% of people on Earth.
TUC is a big deal, but it does get better the lower you go. I've found that I was capable of functioning "normally" below FL180 for an extended period of time (15 minutes of that "altitude" when undergoing training) without any seriously adverse effects. When they brought us back down from altitude we were at 28,000' and they told us to look at the PFDs in the airplane sim. They brought us right back down to sea level oxygen percentages and the color vision returned to our eyes. It's hard to describe but before they did it they appeared normal. When they upped the O2 levels the dull colors of the old t.v. set turned into a bright new HD plasma screen. It was incredible. Neither of us had realized or noticed that symptom from the get go. I'd started with tingly fingers somewhere above FL180 and was thinking a little slower when it came to answering questions on the worksheet.
I'm going to have to go back and see if I can find the worksheet. As we debriefed we noted what altitudes we were experiencing as we progressed and it was pretty funny to see me try to copy a sentence, draw a circle or add numbers.
