Believe it or not, pilots relieving themselves mid-flight has become a national security issue.
For decades, many military pilots who heard nature’s call — particularly those who fly fighters and especially women in those planes — faced an unpleasant reality: use the decades-old ‘piddle packs’ or other devices designed for mid-flight peeing, hold it the whole way, or risk dangerous dehydration by drinking so little water that you never need to go.
But a new device, dubbed the Advanced Inflight Relief Universal System or AIRUS, developed through an Air Force innovation incubator program, may make it easier going for, well, going.
For as long as there have been planes in the sky, pilots in single-seat aircraft like fighter jets or others with ejection seats have had to unbuckle their harnesses and shimmy up from their seats to find a position that allowed for relief. In rare occasions, the urge to go has led to fatal accidents, including one A-10 pilot who failed to re-strap himself properly into his parachute after using a device to pee, only to be forced to eject later in the flight.
But while mishaps are rare, drinking too much water is a daily struggle, particularly for women pilots who fly fighters, who have long found even traditional “piddle packs” to be woefully inadequate. Many say they regularly fly while dehydrated, hurting reflexes and leaving them susceptible to G-induced loss of consciousness — to avoid peeing on a flight.
Other times, they just suffer through it.
“I’ve had days before where I’ve gotten to the end of the runway and been like, ‘Oh man, I already have to pee. This is going to be a really, really painful day,’” a lieutenant colonel told Task & Purpose on condition of anonymity because she is still on active duty. “There are a couple times that I’ve gotten on the ground, and I’m just like, ‘I really hope nothing is wrong with my airplane, and nobody needs to talk to me about troubleshooting anything because I’m going to pee my pants. I need to get out of this jet as fast as humanly possible.’”
A 2023 survey of Navy flyers found that nearly 93% of female pilots and aircrew stationed in California, Japan, and Spain said they would “tactically dehydrate” to avoid having to pee in the cockpit, sometimes not drinking water on flights as long as eight hours. Researchers have found that dehydrated pilots can have lower G-tolerance by up to 50%, leading to G-induced loss of consciousness, a reduction in their physical and cognitive abilities, headaches and altered vision — not things you want to see in pilots flying multi-billion dollar aircraft and dropping bombs at high speeds.
“There’s nothing tactical about ‘tactical dehydration,’ but that’s what we were doing,” said Shelley Mendieta, a retired colonel and weapons system officer for the F-15E.
Piddle-packs and ‘MacGyver’ solutions
Tracy LaTourrette is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who flew F-16s in Iraq. The F-16’s seat, she said, is reclined 30 degrees, with individual leg holes — a great set-up for flying, not so great for peeing.
“It’s super comfortable. It’s great for pulling G’s, but you think about the fact that your hips, that your knees are kind of elevated, it puts your body not in the most advantageous position for taking care of personal business,” LaTourrette said. “When I was there I was the first and only girl in my squadron for many, many years, so I had nobody to follow, nobody to learn from. I just kinda had to figure it out myself.”
So-called piddle-packs have been used for decades by men, and women have to make them work. The devices are little more than a bag filled with gel that can hold about 500 milliliters of urine. For men, using the bag is more “straightforward,” said Dr. Necia Pope, a retired Air Force colonel and urologist. But women, she said, have to get undressed and even stand up to use it.
In 2024, the Air Force was short 1,848 pilots, with just 62% for its fighter aircraft. Women make up just over 20% of the Air Force’s active duty force, but of the 10,964 rated pilots in the Air Force, only 708, or 6.5%, are women, according to a 2024 press release.
LaTourrette said she remembered an early female-specific adaptor for the pack. She found it not very helpful, so she opted to “MacGyver” her own solution by using an adult diaper as a pad and then tossing it into a gallon-sized zip-lock bag.
As a flight surgeon, Pope even recalled trying to practice at home with “a female version of the piddle pack and just peeing all over myself every single time.”
By 2021, the Air Force began testing “Skydrate,” which had a pad for women and a cup for men worn beneath a certain type of underwear that was connected to a tube that led to a pump outside of the flight suit. The pump pulled urine into a collection bag, where it would be stored until they finished their flight.
But even devices with pumps were messy because women have higher “flow rates” than men, Pope said.
“The pump speed wasn’t fast enough so the female flow rate would overwhelm the pump and they would leak all over themselves,” Pope said. “There’s lots of anecdotal stories of people flying wartime missions and they pee all over themselves and they get down and they’re just trying not to have anyone see them because they’re covered in pee or they’ve been sitting in urine for nine hours because they tried to use one of these devices.”
New system, new design
The new AIRUS device began as a proposal for the 2020 Sky High Relief Challenge sponsored by the Air Force Weapon and Innovation Exchange, or AFWERX, the Air Force’s Silicon Valley-style business incubator. The challenge called for a urine collection system that could be used by women pilots and for flight missions lasting up to 16 hours. In 2022, AFWERX awarded a contract to a private company, Airion, to develop the device design. The device officially launched in January.
New pilots arriving for Air Force flight training will get the devices first, while operational units begin to phase them in.
The device comes with five different cups for women and two sizes for men that are attached to a pump and collection bag that can hold up to 1,800 milliliters, or four to seven urinations, according to Colt Seman, founder of Airion, the company behind the device. The device also comes with dual-knit fabric underwear to make it more comfortable, Seman said.
“It’s kind of reversed to what typical designing the military is. It’s usually designed for males, and then, ‘hey, yeah, we’ll make it for a female.’ This was a total opposite approach,” Seman said. “We designed it for the females, and now the males are asking for it.”
The device was tested with pilots flying F-16, F-15, A-10, and F-35 aircraft and included aviators who were early in their careers all the way up to lieutenant colonels. The pilots wanted two things: “the ability to use it on demand and to stay dry,” said Jennifer West, a former Air Force nurse and medical advisor for Airion.
The device has so far worked in Air Force testing. Kayla McCabe, a female fitment coordinator at Air Combat Command’s Aircrew Performance Branch, said they found that it “did not hinder movements” while pilots were doing “critical flight maneuvers” such as close air support like airstrikes and defensive counterattacks.
“It was really a surprise how excited they were. I mean, we’re talking about just peeing right, which is something that we all do,” West said. “That was kind of really an ‘Aha’ moment.”
Shelley Mendieta, a retired colonel and weapons system officer for the F-15E said she’s worked on this issue since her first deployment in 2003 and saw different devices come about over the years. She said the AFWERX competition was a huge step but that it’s taken time for the issue to gain traction “so it becomes something that we’re expected to have and not having to fight for.”
But as she keeps in touch with current pilots who are using the device for themselves, Mendietta said, “This is the most positive I’ve seen this conversation in 25 years.”
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