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It takes muscle memory to don a gas mask or supplied air mask both rapidly and securely in an emergency situation. For working in petrochemical and later in other industries, it initially took me a an hour or two session in a test chamber just to get a mask to fit properly.

Monthly refreshers in safety meetings involved inspecting, cleaning and verifying seals on your personal gear. I had not one but two sets of personal gear plus the office had one SCBA unit that hung on a wall in its protective bag.

Myself and the others could don, adjust and verify the seal on our heavy duty masks in something less than 10 seconds, have an emergency escape mask routinely carried in a belt pouch in use in less than 5 seconds and put a SCBA in action in about 20-30 seconds.

Production plants usually maintain the gas mask gear in a single safety cabinet where any person can grab a mask for emergency use or a work procedure. These are maintained by a safety department that sanitizes and inspects each mask after a single use. After this inspection and maintenance, each mask is bagged up in a ziplock and returned back to the safety cabinet.

I was only in a gas release a couple of times. Once was because of a screw up during maintenance when steam + HCl gas was vented to atmosphere. That sucked. Second time I was on the top of a cooling tower and a puff of chlorine gas happened along. My lungs froze and couldn't inhale. Pulled the escape respirator out of my belt pouch, crammed the mouth bit in my mouth then exhaled. Breathing restored and got the heck outta the location.

In the case of an aircraft such as a jet at 30-40k feet altitude, there are mere seconds for passengers and pilots to react. If you’re slow getting the oxygen supply mask on, you rapidly pass out. Give it a very few more minutes and the unconscious person is also flash frozen at -40 degrees F. The temperature goes from human comfortable to -40F in probably less than a minute so there's not a lot of time for the pilot to loose altitude to 10,000 ft so the ambiant air is for sure life supporting.

Did I understand it right that that there was one pilot and not two? If so, this is weird to me. I've never been on any corporate jet or turbo prop plane that flys greater than 10,000 feet to fly with one pilot. Always with two.