People will visit Denver or New Mexico and feel the altitude at only 6,000 feet or so. They’ll get winded or headaches or other issues till they adjust after a few days.
So how come we breathe without issue on planes if they’re pressurized to 8,000 feet?
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Mostly it is because you are not really exercising at all when you are on an airplane. At most you get up to go to the bathroom.
Compare that to being in Denver, where even if you are not doing exercise that you think of as exercise you might be walking from one side of a parking lot to another, and that is dozens of times more exercise than walking to the bathroom on an airplane.
There are couple of reasons reasons. One is partial pressures, while the cabin is pressurized to 8000ft the amount of O2 is different (higher) than it would be on a mountain at 8000ft. Second is the amount of physical activity in a plane v. outside in those areas, so you are less likely to have the physical demand in a airplane v. the real world.
You’re not trying to walk five blocks in an airliner, so there is no opportunity to get winded.
It means the pressure of the air you’re breathing is the same as if you were on an 8,000′ mountain (even though you’re actually ~30,000-40,000′ above sea level).
It does feel like breathing at high altitude. But virtually nobody that doesn’t already live there spends hours just sitting in a chair watching TV for hours at 8,000′. The only time us normal low-altitude humans experience those kinds of altitudes is on an airplane when we’re doing nothing or when we’re climbing a mountain. If you try to run a treadmill on an airplane you’ll notice it pretty quickly.
Most people don’t start exhibiting any noticeable altitude symptoms until about 6,500′, and most don’t have any meaningful symptoms until near 10,000′. At 8,000′ while sedentary most people just don’t notice.
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