New Improved Pilot Wee-Wee Bottle

When a military pilot has to use the toilet, what does (s)he do? Glad you asked.

“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.

The men’s model uses a pouch; the women’s has something that resembles a sanitary napkin.

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 just held it in. Many avoid liquids, or make sure their last stop before climbing into the cockpit is a bathroom.

At least twice, F-16s have crashed as their pilots tried to pee.

In 1992, one crashed in Turkey after a belt buckle got wedged between the seat and the control stick. After that, the Air Force changed the recommended procedure, urging pilots not to unbuckle completely.

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 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, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., helped the Air Force get $3.3 million for Omni to develop the system.

Oh, that's hilarious. Leahy - - Senator Depends, as Rush Limbaugh calls him for his propensity to leak classified information - - involved in stopping military pilot leaks!