MUSC hosts High-Altitude Flight Symposium, featuring experts from NASA, Air Force, academia and more

The Medical University of South Carolina is hosting a High-Altitude Flight Symposium that will bring together specialists from the Air Force, NASA, the Pentagon and more. MUSC, which has an Aerospace and Performance Program in its College of Medicine, organized the Aug. 12 through 14 event with Joint Base Charleston.

The symposium, in MUSC’s Drug Discovery Building, will focus on the science of keeping humans healthy while they’re working in high altitudes. That’s something Mark Rosenberg, M.D., director of MUSC’s Division of Aerospace and Performance Neurology, is very familiar with. He works with members of the 437^th Airlift Wing at Joint Base Charleston and will help open the symposium on Aug. 12.

“The 437^th are part of what's called Air Mobility Command. They're effectively the ones that are responsible for all transportation. So that includes both human as well as material payloads. That even includes warheads and the president's limos and everything in between,” Rosenberg said.

The unit regularly flies above 35,000 feet unpressurized. “They're flying 30-plus hours in the air. They're flying almost exclusively at night. So they have night vision goggles on all the time. And so naturally, they're going to get a lot of wear and tear,” Rosenberg said.

“Because they're not flying these super sexy fighter jets, people just don't pay as much attention to them. But they still have their own health issues, specifically neurologic issues, including circadian dysregulation (sleep-wake cycle problems), cognitive fatigue and more.”

Paul Eberhart, a civilian with the Department of the Air Force at Joint Base Charleston, said there’s a lot of high-altitude expertise in different pockets of the country. The symposium will bring those specialists together.

“We want to provide a forum for government, industry and academic professionals to discuss, learn, collaborate and identify gaps in safe operations in high-altitude flight.”

He said the gathering of experts and practitioners will allow them to data mine the high-altitude body of knowledge and practices and create a list of issues, concerns and gaps related to high-altitude flight for potential further research and use.

Lives may depend on it. “In May of this year, the Air Force released an accident investigation report where a civilian died because of decompression sickness resulting from a C-17 test flight,” Eberhart said.

“Dr. Rosenberg and I were attending a human performance conference together in Florida. And I just said, ‘Hey, we have to learn from this tragic incident.’” 

Just three months later, that insight has culminated in a symposium at MUSC that may help move the field of human health in high altitudes forward. “Anytime you can bring together government industry and academia, usually great things happen,” Eberhart said.