What do pilots eat?

[Chalenge]

P51 had a "leak tube".

Even today planes have 'relief tubes' and yes it was taught in basic training on how to properly use one. Not all the water that falls from gliders is intentional ballast. 

[SFRT - Frenchy]

Cold cup noodles here ... Tofu Sandwishes... Peanut butter jelly sandwishes ... carrots ... water. 

Real pilots are skiny  I peed in my water bottle a few times. I had my F/O go in the cargo bay take a dump in a Wallmart plastic bag once, his stomach didn't like the pie he just eate 

[avionix]

I've heard of bomber crews in WWII having to watch what they ate as the altitude could give them some bad stomach cramps.  Better not eat beans the night before.   

[Enker]

I read about something called Bubble n' Squeak, a sort o pancake mixture, made from left over cabbage and potatoes and fried up like latkes. When you got to altitude, they made your intestines get filled with gas, hence the name.

Came from Spitfires, Thunderbolts, and Warm Beer

[eagl]

I never wore an adult diaper on any sortie, including the 13 hr atlantic crossings.  I have had WSOs who had the squirts during sorties and couldn't hold it until we landed, but thankfully I never had to crap myself in the plane.  I did fly back to back 2.5 hr T-37 sorties unpressurized at 25,000 ft while I had full-blown food poisoning, but I had another instructor with me at the time so I pretty much sat in the right seat and concentrated on breathing and not soiling myself for both sorties.  Not fun, not recommended, and the flight doc was not amused since back to back long-duration sorties at 25k is hazardous due to the threat of decompression sickness even when you're 100% healthy.

As for food, "low residue" is the word.  Like wonderbread and processed lunchmeat, stuff that has lots of calories and digests easy.

Water and fruit juice to drink.  Pee into a special bag with a funnel built into the top and granulated gelatin inside.  For sorties in an anti-exposure suit (think mildly flame-retardant scuba drysuit) they have a tube thingy you can use to help make sure you don't pee all over yourself or the seat, but I never need to use it having managed to figure out the geometry problem of how to pee into a bag while wearing a drysuit.

I often brought a snickers bar and maybe a chewy granola bar on "shorter" 6 hour sorties where I figured I'd be out of the plane before I had to take a dump.

[Anodizer]

As for food, "low residue" is the word.  Like wonderbread and processed lunchmeat, stuff that has lots of calories and digests easy.

Interesting...  Surprised they don't have some kind of issued meals for long duration flights..  No doubt they'd be something like what astronauts have, low residue
included..

I've done considerable research especially into the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab food technologies as well as "waste management systems".
Amazing how primitive some of the stuff was especially in the earlier days..  It was worse for the Russians..

Anyhow, thanks to all for the insight..  <S>

[Serenity]

I never wore an adult diaper on any sortie, including the 13 hr atlantic crossings.  I have had WSOs who had the squirts during sorties and couldn't hold it until we landed, but thankfully I never had to crap myself in the plane.  I did fly back to back 2.5 hr T-37 sorties unpressurized at 25,000 ft while I had full-blown food poisoning, but I had another instructor with me at the time so I pretty much sat in the right seat and concentrated on breathing and not soiling myself for both sorties.  Not fun, not recommended, and the flight doc was not amused since back to back long-duration sorties at 25k is hazardous due to the threat of decompression sickness even when you're 100% healthy.

As for food, "low residue" is the word.  Like wonderbread and processed lunchmeat, stuff that has lots of calories and digests easy.

Water and fruit juice to drink.  Pee into a special bag with a funnel built into the top and granulated gelatin inside.  For sorties in an anti-exposure suit (think mildly flame-retardant scuba drysuit) they have a tube thingy you can use to help make sure you don't pee all over yourself or the seat, but I never need to use it having managed to figure out the geometry problem of how to pee into a bag while wearing a drysuit.

I often brought a snickers bar and maybe a chewy granola bar on "shorter" 6 hour sorties where I figured I'd be out of the plane before I had to take a dump.

Ever have anything like this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNdR53fyLck

Warning!: Some foul language!

[Hornet33]

My dad flew C-5's for 15 years or so as a load master then flight engineer. He always told me depending on how long the flight was going to be, they'd send someone on a McDonalds run before takeoff. Course the C-5 has 2 fully functional galleys onboard. One up in the forward crew compartment between the cockpit and the wing box, and one in the upper aft troop bay. He said standard long duration over water flights though, they would be issued Swanson TV dinners they could heat up in the galley ovens but most of the guys would bring a small cooler from home with a bunch of food and drinks in them. I think they have microwave ovens onboard now. The C-5 also has 2 heads onboard just like what you'd find on a commercial airliner.

I know for sure though that part of my dads flight kit was his small coleman cooler and thermos. He never left the house when he was flying without packing a bunch of food in the cooler and filling his thermos with a pot of coffee. One of the advantages of flying a trash hauler.

Reminds me of a joke my dad told me once.

A KC-135 tanker was refueling a flight of F-16's on their way over to Europe. One of the F-16 pilots after refueling started doing barrel rolls off to the side of the tanker, and generally giving the tanker pilot grief for flying a bus.

The tanker pilot called over the radio and says to the F-16 pilot, "Hey that's some fancy flyng!! You wanna see something REALLY neat though?"

The F-16 pilt responds in a smug voice, "Sure bus driver, lets see what you got."

After 5 minutes goes by and the tanker keeps flying in a straight and level manner the F-16 pilot calls over and asks, "Hey I thought you were going to do something impressive."

The tanker pilot responds, "I shut down 2 engines, went and took a piss, and made my self a sandwich....your turn!!"

[eagl]

There is a running joke about tanker pilots getting upset whenever a fighter request results in them having to put down their pudding cup in order to comply...

That said, when I went to combat archer, I got a last-minute flight on the tanker hauling everyone who didn't get to fly down a fighter down to tyndall.  Since I was last aboard, I had to sit in the instructor jumpseat.  All I can say is... damn.  Freaking pigsty.  There were old boxed lunches sort of crammed under the seat with half-eaten food squishing out of the containers, the prototypical empty pudding cups with the spoon sticking out of the empty cup and a little dribble of purplish-brown pudding dripping onto the floor, and a coke can stuffed between an insulation liner and a piece of structural sheet metal that was sort of hidden from view so it had probably been there for months.

Maybe that plane just returned from a long mission or something and they didn't have time to clean out the cockpit, but I was taught as a Lt that if I made a crew chief clean out my mess no matter how small, I owed him a case of beer no questions asked.  I still remember running out into a driving thunderstorm one sortie when I realized I had left a supplemental checklist in the cockpit, and I wanted to retrieve it before the crew chief found it and traded it for some beer.  Unfortunately I ran up to the plane right as a grizzled 20-year staff Sgt came down the ladder with a big s**t-eating grin on his face and my checklist in his hand, because he knew I was going to provide the beer for his weekend movie night 

[Holden McGroin]

All pilots have the choice  of steak or fish.

That's why I had the lasagna

[crazyivan]

I just thought they took a big handfull. Of the little bags of peanuts you get, when you fly commercial. 

[wrongwayric]

Well the pilots/rio's that i worked with flying F4 phantoms and F18's would take all kinds of stuff to snack on, and during the over seas ferry flights (Beaufort S.C. to Iwakuni Japan, 2 tours, and 1 tour to Yeachon Korea) the cockpit's had no room to spare.

Fruit and raw veggies (carrots, celery, radishes, cauliflower, ect..) seemed to be the biggest snack foods.

MRE's when they first came out had a pork patty meal, thing looked like a dogg turd, that they had to discontinue because when pilots would eat it, it caused so much gas in the pilots that they'd get a form of the bends when they went up to altitude.

As for taking a leak, we had what they called "piddle packs" they were heavy duty clear document bags (zip lock bags) that had a compressed dry sponge in them. Pee into bag, sponge soaks up pee, seal, throw in trash after landing.