Political Quotes

“I come to the floor to speak about a troubling issue for our Navy, our national defense, and a problem that should be of concern to Members of this body. Our Navy pilot training installations, including Naval Air Station Meridian in my home State of Mississippi, produce some of the finest pilots on the planet. They trained on the T-45 Goshawk. On Friday, March 31, a significant number of T-45 instructor pilots at NAS Meridian, NAS Kingsville in Texas, and NAS Pensacola in Florida decided not to fly because of safety concerns. As you can imagine, this was an almost unprecedented act and brought considerable attention to a problem plaguing the Navy's tactical fighter community: a dramatic and sustained increase in so-called physiological episodes, or PE events, across the FA-18 Hornet, the EA-18 Growler, and the training jet T-45 Goshawk fleets. Physiological episodes occur when air crew experience diminished inflight performance related to loss or contamination of oxygen, depressurization in the cockpit, or other factors. There are some technical terms I am going to mention to my colleagues. Hypoxic hypoxia occurs when pilots are getting insufficient oxygen. A more serious phenomenon called histotoxic hypoxia occurs when they are breathing contaminated oxygen, and of course depressurization occurs when the cabin pressure drops. I have been assured that solving this physiological episode problem is now naval aviation's No. 1 one safety priority.…”