Vermont company devises a pit stop of sorts for the wild blue yonder
MILTON, Vt. - It's a dilemma as old as manned flight: When you gotta' go, how do you go?
For fighter pilots zooming through the sky at 500 miles an hour, there are no rest areas.
But now, a Vermont company has come up with a 21st-century solution that replaces unwieldy "piddle packs" and painful waits with a system that pilots can use without unstrapping themselves from their seats.
"As you can imagine, Air Force pilots have many responsibilities during a mission, maintaining their sights, monitoring fuel, navigating the aircraft and monitoring their weapons systems - and they gotta' go so bad they can hardly think," said Mark Harvie, president of Omni Medical Inc.
"This takes care of that problem for them," he said.
The system, called the Advanced Mission Extender Device, uses special underwear equipped with a hose linked to a pump the size of a paperback book that drains urine into a collection bag.
For pilots, the difficulty in answering nature's call is as old as flying itself. Over the decades, pilots have used bottles and bags, or held it in. Many avoid liquids, or make their last stop before climbing into the cockpit a bathroom.
At least twice, F-16s have crashed as their pilots tried to urinate.
In Some pilots do permanent damage to their bladders by holding it in for hours at a time, which can cause incontinence and other problems later in life.
"The bladder is a muscle," said Dr. Sam Trotter, chairman of the Urology Department at Fletcher Allen Health care in Burlington. "If you get this chronic overdistention of the bladder, they can have trouble down the road."
Some pilots dehydrate themselves before flying.
But that has its own dangers. Fighter pilots need to be able to withstand heavy G-forces and even a little bit of dehydration can greatly reduce a pilot's ability to withstand such pressures, Harvie said.
The device, a pistol-shaped plastic container filled with chemicals that converts urine into a gelatinous substance to be disposed of later, is the standard now.
The push for a better system began in earnest after female pilots started flying fighters in 1993, Harvie said. In 2000, the Pentagon sent out a request for proposals for what might best be described as midair defueling systems.
Harvie answered it.
"I read it over with a couple of my people and we sort of snickered, and said 'Oh, you've got to be kidding, they must have a solution for this, they've been flying airplanes since the early 1900s,' " he said. But they didn't.
He applied for a research grant and built a prototype. Omni, which started out as a five-person operation, is now 44 people working out of a building in an industrial park. Over the years, US Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont DemocratD-Vermont, helped the Air Force get $3.3 million for Omni to develop the system.
The company's engineers worked with F-16 pilots from the Vermont Air National Guard, some of whom used his devices as they were being developed.
"They didn't really want to talk about it, literally, because they're fighter pilots and they didn't want the public to realize that this was an issue," Harvie said.
