People complain about my lack of — endurance. Oh, sure, they know that I can force my chubby frame to waddle some seven to 10 miles in running shoes even when no one's chasing me. I'm talking about that other endurance, the kind where one hears the lecture that there are no rest stops in the sky. Turns out, I'm not the only one with a bladder of clay. For as long as airplanes have been able to sustain vast distances, they have been flown by people who can't.
Take, for example, the crew of the Curtiss NC-4, which in 1919 became the first airplane to cross the Atlantic. Knowing full well that the huge flying boat did not come equipped with a head, the pilots brought along a few weather balloons as a substitute. There also being no radio beacons at the time, the NC-4's route was marked by a series of Navy destroyers. The airplane's crew had already taken turns and filled one weather balloon when the first destroyer asked them to drop a souvenir of the historic flight. The crew set up for a bomb run and plopped the balloon squarely onto the destroyer's deck. There were no other such requests during the rest of the flight.
In truth, we are all pretty much constantly bombarded by our bladders — five to nine times a day, said Dr. Harvey Wichman, director of the Aerospace Psychology Laboratory at California's Claremont McKenna College and a 3,000-hour CFI. According to Wichman, the average bladder can hold just a third of a quart. When it becomes but a fifth full, we start to feel the urge. And when it approaches two-thirds of its maximum capacity, a dastardly process called the Micturition Reflex begins. "It's the feeling that you suddenly have to go that builds and builds," he said. "Then it relaxes and the intensity passes; then the reflex comes again, and it keeps coming in waves. Each time your brain comes in and overrides the Micturition Reflex. It can override it until you experience five times the pressure of that first reflex, then...there's nothing you can do about it."
If that weren't enough, the good doctor added, all these pressures and waves bring the Yerkes-Dodson Law into effect. The law states that performance is an optimum function of arousal. Translating into pilot English, Wichman said, "A highly stretched bladder produces arousal, and in a pilot such activities as landing and taking off also produce arousal. Adding together both forms of arousal can push the pilot past the optimum performance level." Plain English translation: In an airplane, the urge to purge can lead to mistakes and disaster.
Wichman advised preventive medicine. Avoid caffeine, which is a diuretic; it forces you to eliminate more fluid than you take on. And then there's gum. While chewing it, you swallow saliva, which is just so much additional fluid to your kidneys. So toss out the Beeman's, Chuck. In fact, excitement alone starts those kidneys working, so then your bladder fills a little further, and in no time you've worked your urinary tract into a downward spiral, a biological tailspin. To break the cycle, "take a deep breath, relax, and tell yourself to stay calm," Wichman advised.
But if you've ever thumbed through the Sporty's Pilot Shop catalog, you know there are other pragmatic solutions. To see how these items worked, I called Stuart Kennedy, my friend and contact at Sporty's, and he agreed to send me a sampling. In no time a huge cardboard box arrived from Batavia, Ohio. Inside I found the Little John, a gourd-shaped, screw-capped receptacle (colored red — for quick recognition and retrieval, I suppose); the Lady J adapter, a sky-blue device to convert Little John to female use ("Actually lets women get relief while standing!" announced the packaging) but which might be mistaken for a breather mask by an oxygen-deprived pilot; and three shiny white Convenience Bags, each with a block of absorptive material inside. "For motion sickness and urine disposal...no ties, no strings, no mess," reads the side. Though journalistic ethics normally dictate that writers return all products once they've been thoroughly tested, Kennedy urged me to keep everything this time.
Of course, I suddenly had on hand more receptacles than even I could handle alone, so the good folks at my FBO put me in contact with a notoriously weak-bladdered pilot whom we'll call Bob.
Before taking off we spent several minutes loading up on water; then we sloshed over to the FBO's spare Cessna 152 and shoehorned ourselves (neither of us is a petite man) and all our gear inside. The visibly burdened airplane parted with the runway only reluctantly, but then we were climbing out toward our grand adventure as test pilots. I told Bob that he could try the Little John, while I would test the Convenience Bag. He held up the Lady J adaptor and inspected it quizzically from all angles. "How am I supposed to use this?" he asked.
"You're not," I said. We nosed over toward the nearest major body of water for inspiration.
"So, do you feel anything yet?" I asked after cruising above the waves for a while.
"I think so," he replied. "Don't look." After a few seconds, however, he realized that he just couldn't sit there and perform the test — he would have to try to stand. Unbuckling his seat belt, he pushed himself up so that the back of his neck was flush against the cockpit ceiling. From the side, his body took the form of a question mark. As he maneuvered his way into position, I felt the Cessna's nose try to yaw back and forth.
"Uh, could you try to keep your feet away from the rudder pedals?" I asked.
"Sorry. This is very, very difficult," he said in a strained voice.
"Maybe I should have done a couple of clearing turns before attempting this maneuver," I said, and I scanned the instruments and watched for traffic. Most of the time I looked straight ahead and out the left window, though I forced myself to take a sideways glance or two to the right, for safety's sake.
"All done," he pronounced, screwing the cap on Little John and proudly swishing its contents before my eyes.
"That's not much."
"It's harder than it looks."
I swung the Cessna around, took a deep breath, and gave Bob the controls. Leaving my left arm inside the shoulder harness, I unbuckled the seat belt and forced myself off the seat and into the crooked standing position. Since it was a cool day and I had ridden my motorcycle to the airport, I had a couple of layers of thermal underwear beneath my Levis. I attacked all those layers while Bob started whistling "Off we go into the wild blue yonder/Off we fly into the air...." With my goal in sight, I held the Convenience Bag's ample opening in position and...nothing. My bladder had turned bashful.
"Think about Niagara Falls," Bob suggested. So I forced visions of waterfalls and mighty rivers into my brain, but they kept morphing into the face of "Iron Bladder" Lindbergh, New York to Paris in 33 hours and no pit stops. Finally, beneath all those layers of clothing, a trickle began.
"That's enough," I said, frustrated, and retook my seat. When the bag's absorbent material seemed to have finished absorbing the sparse libation (only later did I realize that the bag's cardboard opening acted as a check valve), I leaned it against the fuselage wall behind Bob's seat, very carefully. Bob flew us back to the airport, and on the way we decided the fault lay not in the equipment we were testing — and certainly not in the equipment we were testing it with — but rather with the equipment we were testing it in. Given the relative spaciousness of a Cessna 172, Piper Archer, or Beech Bonanza, we were sure our experiment would have concluded with an easier, more dynamic flow rate.
I took over again once we entered the traffic pattern. "You want this?" Bob asked, wielding the Little John and its toxic contents.
"It's yours — and you can present the Lady J adaptor to your wife with my compliments," I said. "In fact, take my Convenience Bag, too. It's slightly used, but...."
"I'll pass," he punned, albeit unintentionally.
Related Articles
