My experience is that an Air Hawk will not elevate you (it does not elevate me) if inflated correctly. That is no doubt the biggest problem with them, over-inflation making them like 'riding a beach ball' rather than just a thin cushion of air under all parts of you that touch the saddle. They really do not need much air at all, and any amount more than needed is a step in the wrong direction, at least that is my wife and my experience.
So if used correctly, all that happens is that there is a thin film of air under the rider, but no real lifting will happen. The cushion will fill in any areas that are not already bearing on the saddle but not actually lift the pressure points that were what you were sitting on in the first place. Difficult to articulate but this might be a reasonable example: think of the air in the cushion as something that allows the saddle to conform perfectly to your butt but does not lift the lowest points, usually your sitz bones, at all and just leaves the lowest points where they were in the first place. Put another way, if you are using 30% of the saddle's available area to support all your weight, the air just spreads the weight out over more of the saddle without moving the lowest points up at all.
The same thing applies as far as feeling 'attached' to the saddle while riding; if the rider feels like he / she is floating around on an inflated device, the cushion has too much air in it. The right amount of air will not allow the user to slide around or feel unattached to the bike.
As an example: an Air Hawk is a lot of smaller air cells attached to each other with thin capillaries; if all the cells are full of air when the cushion is just sitting on a table flat, it has too much air in it already.
Brian
I would love to have more cushioning, but can't afford even a fraction of an inch of sitting higher due to short legs