Originally Posted by WillSkiGT

Climbing a peak is not the same as sudden decompression. Your body has time to acclimatize when you are climbing a mountain. When the cabin of an aircraft loses pressurization, your body effectively is going from 6-8k feet to whatever the external altitude is within 1-2 seconds.



Again, those people are acclimatized, not experiencing a rapid decompression. The human body can acclimatize up to ~8,000m, but it takes months to achieve this. A sudden decompression to 14k feet gives around 30 mins of useful consciousness.



There's an exemption for quick deploying masks. Really, the most sinister type of decompression is when there is a bleed valve issue or something similar, where the pilots slowly lose situational awareness due to hypoxia. This is what killed Payne Stewart and what happened with the Helios flight in 2005. The pilots will set an altitude in the autopilot and slowly become hypoxic, which makes it even harder for them to identify that there is an issue.