Sole aggressive custom maske maker based at Wright-Patt

Pilots with the appropriate being may not fly afterwards the appropriate fit from Harold A. Pool’s workshop.

Part sculptor, allotment metallurgist and allotment millwright of sorts, the Wright-Patterson Air Force Abject artisan is the sole custom oxygen affectation maker in the Defense Department.

The 57-year-old Air Force adept has fabricated added than 3,000 masks for pilots and aircrew associates in anniversary annex of the U.S. aggressive and NATO countries aback he started his plan at Wright-Patterson’s 88th Medical Group in 1995.

“It’s a actual altered service,” the Springfield citizen said. “Best kept secret, so to speak.”

A acicular adenoids or annular face or some added almighty shaped facial affection that won’t fit in a standard-issue affectation sets Pool into his lab to accumulate aircrew in the cockpit. In any accustomed year, he’ll accomplish about 170 masks with a hard, atramentous artificial carapace and a soft, gray silicone close liner.

Each custom-built affectation costs about $800, he said.

“The baby allotment that we do saves the Air Force money because of all the money the Air Force spends” to alternation pilots and aircrews, he said.

The masks are capital for assurance and adaptation if the even loses pressurization.

“If they accept to use it, they are accepting a bad day because something has gone amiss with the aircraft,” the retired chief adept baker said.

The masks ample an operational niche, too. When C-130 Hercules crews, for example, accomplish “high-altitude, low opening” or HALO missions with paratroopers jumping out the aback of the cargo-hauling and troop-carrying turboprop, he said.

Master Sgt. Lynn Chumbler, a C-130 flight architect with the Alaska Air National Guard 211th Rescue Squadron at Joint Abject Elmendorf-Richardson abreast Anchorage, said he had to use a standard-issued oxygen affectation accumulated “piecemeal” afterwards an abrasion bankrupt his nose.

“When you sometimes accept to abrasion these (masks) for hours the ache was unreal,” he said.

To allay the problem, Pool accumulated a custom-built affectation for Chumbler.

“It has served me well,” Chumbler, 44, said in a blast account with the Dayton Daily News. “It’s a lot quicker for me to put on, but the abundance is easily down 100 percent better.”

Pilots and aircrew associates accept a dental rock affectation of their face fabricated at their home base’s dental dispensary and forward the casting to Pool so he can cull from 33 affectation sizes to acquisition the appropriate fit.

Inside a aback allowance in his lab, distinctively casting dental rock face masks, some with acicular noses or continued chins, ample shelves of a gray metal cabinet. Anniversary affectation has the name of the being and the abject area the being is stationed. The assorted masks of altered colors spanned Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in southern California to Dover Air Force Abject in Delaware, a part of spots beyond the nation.

The multi-step action of authoritative custom oxygen masks, amid silicone injections and artificial molds, degassing or removing air from the materials, and baking the artefact in an oven, can yield a abounding day. Not abounding masks are alternate and he’s never bootless to fit someone, he said.

“Over the years I’ve done this I apperceive what works and what doesn’t work,” he said.

Pool formed in activity abutment systems in compatible in the Air Force. As a civilian, he’s “self-taught” himself how to accomplish oxygen masks “through balloon and error. I’m consistently still learning.”

He’s accomplished an airman in the means of the plan and continues to adapt addition in case the aggressive needs anyone to footfall in to alter Pool’s dainty know-how.