Hyperventilation
Excess carbon dioxide loss from over-breathing, its symptoms, and how to correct it.
9 min read · Human factors
After this lesson you can
- Explain what actually goes wrong in hyperventilation, and why it is not the opposite of hypoxia in effect.
- List the symptoms hyperventilation shares with hypoxia, and the ones that help tell them apart.
- Apply the correct sequence of actions to stop hyperventilation in flight.
Hyperventilation is the excessive rate and depth of breathing, leading to an abnormal loss of carbon dioxide from the blood. It occurs more often among pilots than is generally recognized, and while it rarely incapacitates completely, its symptoms can alarm a pilot who does not recognize what is happening — which, ironically, makes the breathing rate increase further and the problem worse.
The practical difficulty is that many hyperventilation symptoms overlap with hypoxia. In flight, correctly telling the two apart matters, because the right first action is not the same.
The rest of this lesson
- 1.What actually happens
- 2.Distinguishing it from hypoxia
- 3.Correcting it
- 4.Where it shows up in training
- 5.In the doubt, in flight
These 5 sections, their figures, the checks along the way and the end-of-lesson quiz come with the PPL track. Paid once, yours for good.
Key terms
Try to recall each definition before turning the card.