Ever have that “Uh Oh, my stomach is gurgling feeling?

Sometimes, its not when you are in a good place to, um, remedy the problem.

Like in the air.

While you are flying.

Preflighting for a flight is important. Lots of different things. Including your bowels. Yeah, that’s what I said. You know what I mean if you have ever found yourself in the pilot’s seat doing the stomach gurgle, “Oh oh, not now” thought process in your mind.

Lots of pilots have found themselves in the moment of flying when one of aviation’s most unspoken horrors happens, the mid-flight gastrointestinal rebellion. You know the one—when your stomach decides to throw a party, but your plane is smaller than a broom closet, and the only “facilities” are somewhere on the ground, maybe farther away than you think you might be able to make it. We’re talking about those nail-biting moments where you’re wrestling with your bowels while wrestling with the yoke, praying to the aviation gods that you make it back to terra firma before you turn your cockpit into a biohazard zone.

Because if you can’t hold it back, you just might become a legend for all the wrong reasons.

I have been there, friends have been there, and some have made it, and some haven’t, but in the end, it is all human moments that happen and we have to laugh at them later.

I’m talking to you, the pilots who’ve stared death in the face—not from engine failure or bird strikes, but from the sheer terror of potentially pooping your pants at altitude. If you haven’t had it happen yet as a pilot, don’t worry, it will happen sometime. Buckle up, because this ride is about to get turbulent…in more ways than one.

Let’s start with the basics. If you’re flying commercial jumbos like a 777 or a nice business jet, congratulations—you’ve got lavatories bigger than some pilots’ apartments. But for us general aviation folks, weekend warriors, in rickety Cessna 152s, Piper Cherokees on flight lessons with a student who hasn’t bothered to shower in the last three days in the Florida heat, or flying an old Aztec doing lines back and forth doing aerial survey, bathrooms are a luxury reserved for the ground. These planes aren’t built to have us in them for long periods of time. As long as our stomachs understand how long they have to wait to do this. When our body doesn’t, and we need to make a change of flight plan to get to the ground quickly, the hope is our bowels will hang on long enough to get us there or that the cockpit can quickly become a panic room.

Picture this: You’re cruising at 5,500 feet, the world below looking like a patchwork quilt, the 18th time you have flown this same cross-country route with a student in the last year. Mostly bored, until that boredom is broken. By a gurgle. It’s subtle at first, like a distant thunderhead on the radar. You ignore it. “Probably just the thermos of coffee I chugged at the FBO,” you tell yourself. But oh no, my friend. That’s the opening act. Soon, it’s a full symphony in your gut, complete with brass sections and percussion that rivals a hailstorm on the prop.

And now it’s a critical “lesson in diversion” that you’re teaching your student. But this one is for real. They don’t get it at first, talking through “what they would do,” missing the cue from you that, “no, no, we are actually doing this.” You get them to make the turn toward that airport, that is 18 miles away, and you are counting down every second of those miles. It first starts with miles, then as you get closer, and the cacophony in your stomach rises so you start counting down the tenths of miles, then the seconds to the destination that you programmed into the GPS, prompting your student to head that way post haste. With 5 miles to go, they ask, “Should we turn back on course?”

Still thinking you are just doing this as an exercise, they don’t understand just yet how critical of a decision there was that got made a few miles back there.

Yeah, this one is going to be a real landing. Now you just hope you make it, and that door code for all the local airports in the state works at this one.

It doesn’t always. And sometimes you just have to go with what you get when you get the ground.

I found this out the hard way once.

It started with a long flight in a Piper Cherokee I had from Tampa Bay back to Michigan. Late at night. A stop in Lexington about 11pm found me and my passenger hungry. In the moment, I thought the line guy was doing me a favor when he told me a place that was still open for some food. He told us about taco truck that “was good” just down the road. That answer didn’t turn out to be a favor later.

While he fueled us, we grabbed the courtesy car and headed down the road. It should have been a hint this was going to go bad that three of the four wheels on the truck were on cement blocks. But hey, we were hungry.

So, with a couple tacos in hand to go, we went back to the airport, launched for the “last leg” of the flight back home, about 3 hours long, and ate our tacos shortly after leveling off.

Less than an hour later, the gurgle started. And hope sprang eternal that I would make it the next 2 hours ‘til home. But that hope quickly disappeared as the urgency rose.

Ok, ok, find the nearest airport. This was in the pre-GPS days, when the nearest airport wasn’t as obvious, so I struggled through looking at the chart in the dark and found a direction and headed there immediately.

The good news is that it wasn’t all that far.

An unattended single runway airport in the middle of southern Indiana, became a salvation. An airport terminal with a bathroom that I imagined shining like a beacon under a ray of sun from heaven that night.

Until, well, until after I had parked the plane, bailing out quickly, and hobbled my way to the front door where the after-hours access code had to be entered to release the lock.

One, two, three times I tried the code that was listed in the airport directory. Dear god it wasn’t working. I tried the unicom frequency, 1200, 7700, anything else I could think of that were common general access codes at local airports. They weren’t working. I checked the airport directory again, clenching, and I had the code right, it just wasn’t working.

But my stomach wasn’t waiting anymore. I wasn’t going to get inside in time, so it was time to do something else.

My pride sinking, I shuffled around the side of the building where there were some shrubs, sighed, and did what came naturally.

Pride at an all time low, I asked my then-girlfriend to gather whatever napkins she could find in the plane and bring them to me. I guess you could count this as a case where I “made it” without creating a biohazard cockpit moment, but it wasn’t exactly a real win.

I just hope the landscaping folks didn’t have to find that deposit before the weather and time biodegraded it.

What causes these betrayals? Airport food, for starters. How about those mystery burritos from the vending machine at Podunk Regional? Or the Indian curry takeout you grabbed between flights at the place in the strip mall that has a website that doesn’t work because they haven’t been able to pay for the renewal of their domain? That has to be OK right? I mean, it’s close. All this junk food is basically gastrointestinal time bombs. Add in some turbulence that sloshes everything around like a bad cocktail, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

I’ve heard tales from pilots who’ve blamed everything from bad fuel (aviation fuel, not the edible kind) to cosmic rays. But whatever the trigger, the result is the same: You’re alone up there, no co-pilot to hand off controls while you improvise a solution, and the nearest runway feels like it’s on another planet. Or worse, you are the CFI up there with your student and it is now imperative that you cut that lesson short. Its not time to do that extra landing with them, and somehow you need to hold on to make it back to the FBO toilet that is next to the desk where everyone will hear you doing your business. If you make it back you won’t even care about paying small indignity price to avoid having to do clean up on aisle three in the right seat of that old Cessna 172, the seats of which you are now clenching harder with your ass than you would a conditional job offer from a major airline.

Flying a little bigger plane that has a bathroom isn’t always better either.

A good friend detailed the story of flying a King Air from Montana back to Texas where his co-pilot’s body betrayed him.

He said it wasn’t more than about 20 minutes into the flight when his copilot, let’s call him “Clench,” looked over from the right seat and said, “I think I need to go to the bathroom.”

The sinking indignity was apparently obvious on his face.

The good news, the plane had a “potty seat.”

The bad news, well, it wasn’t an empty leg.

Sitting in the back seat was the equivalent of a Hollywood princess daughter and her little lap dog. As my friend tells the story, imagine a stuck up rich kid version of Nicole Richie or Paris Hilton back there.

“Are you sure?” the captain, my friend, asked him.

He apparently sighed and said, “Yeah.”

So, shame building, he shuffled his way to the back seat, pulled the extremely minimal privacy giving curtain around the potty seat, and did his business.

As he shuffled his way back to the front, and for the rest of the flight, said princess passenger held her nose in the sweater that she pulled up over most of her face and nose, the look of disgust visible to the captain but not the copilot who could no longer look her in the face.

The next couple hours of flight were swarmed in the lingering smell of the after effects of those biscuits and gravy that had killed his stomach that morning.

Clench said he even thought the dog was giving him a look of disgust.

These moments have phases as they are thrust upon a pilot in the cockpit.

There are phases of this aerial agony.

Denial. It typically starts here. The initial gurgle. You blame the engine noise, the radio static, anything but your traitorous tummy. “I’m a professional,” you think. “I’ve handled spins, stalls, and screaming passengers. This is nothing. I am sure I can make it. It won’t get worse.”

Bargaining. You promise your body riches—bland diets forever, no more spicy wings at fly-ins. You calculate ETAs obsessively: “If I push to 140 knots, I can shave off three minutes.” Meanwhile, your sphincter is doing overtime, holding back the floodgates like a tiny Dutch boy with his finger in the dike.

Anger. Why now? Why me? You curse the breakfast burrito, the bumpy thermals, even gravity itself. Your flying becomes erratic—slight banks turn into wild yaws as you shift uncomfortably. Holding altitude gets harder as you lose focus. Even ATC asks if everything’s okay. “Affirmative,” you lie through gritted teeth.

Depression. Visions of embarrassment flash before your eyes. Mocking from fellow pilots. The stories: “Pilot soiled aircraft due to poor pre-flight planning.” You contemplate landing in a field, but cornstalks aren’t forgiving.

Acceptance… and Acceleration. You declare an emergency silently, to yourself and haul ass to the ground. The relief upon landing? Better than acing your checkride. Assuming you make it.

Resignation. When you realize you just might not make it. You admit to yourself there is going to be a cleanup required when you get to the ground.

Humor aside, these phases are real. I’ve polled (anonymously, of course) a bunch of pilots, and 9 out of 10 admit to at least one close call. The 10th is lying.

I vividly remember a flight in an old citation I was taking with a friend, playing right seat radio guy for the day when I found the gurgle hitting me at 32,000 feet with a solid hour to go to our fuel stop destination.

All of these phases became a part of my experience. Dear god, I remember basically doing the male equivalent of lamaze breathing exercises trying to keep from pooping myself.

I counted down the moments on the Garmin 400 box, cursing every time the headwind got a little stronger and the time went up instead of down.

My pilot friend wasn’t helping, knowing my state of agony and watching me struggle through it, laughing at me at some points, almost in tears as I struggled with my body, but also in complete understanding of the struggle that I was going through.

We took a descent early, trying to pick up the speed along the way and knock off some of the winds. Grand Island, Nebraska loomed closer and closer but the stomach contractions were coming faster and harsher.

The old citation didn’t have a lavatory or potty seat, and we had passengers in the back who were blissfully unaware of their co-pilots dilemma. Had there been an option, I wouldn’t have cared about releasing the rejected breakfast contents in their vicinity. Heck, had there been a bucket I probably would have dropped trow and shit next to them at that point. But that wasn’t an option.

At some point, with about 20 miles to go, an extra violent stomach contraction had me at the resignation stage. I was literally sweating. I simply concluded I wasn’t going to make it, I was going to fill my drawers, and that when we got there I was just going to have to find the nearest Walmart and get a new wardrobe.

Somehow, I made it tjhough.

And for gosh darn sure I was the first person off that plane running in the best ass clenching waddle I could hold together to the bathroom that beckoned like a winning lottery ticket left on the ground for anyone to find.

Also thankfully, for the passengers, there was a second bathroom at the airport.

A really good rule of flying, not mine, a friend told me this long ago, is simple: “Never pass a bathroom on the way to an airplane.”

If you are thinking about if you have to go, or “If you could just make it through the short flight,” don’t try. You might regret it later. 

Another friend told me a story of an anniversary flight with his wife that they took in a Cessna 152 up a shoreline for some dinner and back.

On the way home is when he found out that custard from dessert was something that triggered his lactose intolerance.

He had a little inkling before they left before they got into the plane, thinking that the dessert might be going to have a negative effect, but the expected flight time wasn’t long. It couldn’t hit that fast, right?

Oh, how wrong he was.

There were two airports between his starting point and destination, and as the stomach contractions began with fervor after takeoff, it became obvious one of these was going to be a stopping point even on the short flight.

But a Cessna 152 isn’t that fast, and it wasn’t fast enough to get him to the ground before his power to resist the outflow was overcome.

So, yup, there he was in the left seat of the 152 with a pantsload of the custard no longer inside him. On his anniversary dinner flight with his wife. And nowhere in that small space for her to get away from him.

Good thing she liked him a lot. Still does thankfully.

The airport had a bathroom just off the ramp that they could get into where he went in to clean himself up. She found a plastic bag in the FBO in which he could put his fouled lower body clothing.

Fortunately, across the street and down a block was a Walmart.

His wife headed off to buy him some replacement clothing while he stood naked in the bathroom at the airport from the waist down after using most of the bathroom’s stock of toilet paper and paper hand towels to clean up.

And then his phone rang. It was his wife

She had gotten to Walmart. There was a hiccup in the replacement clothes plan.

The power was out and that meant their registers were out and they couldn’t sell anything.

Great timing.

Begging, as she was laughing through the phone, they negotiated with a staff member to just please take cash, more money than it would be, to let her take a pair of underwear and sweat pants out of the store and run the transaction however they wanted when the power came on. “Keep the change, we don’t care,” being the message.

Agreeing after being told why, and probably feeling a little sympathy for the poor pilot at the airport just down the road, his wife walked out with replacement clothing.

Back put together, he said he just gave up on the clothing he had soiled and threw the plastic bag of those clothes in the dumpster next to the ramp.

They made it home without further incident, but with one rough anniversary story that might be chalked up to a “relationship bonding moment” that neither will forget.

It isn’t always you either. It can be a passenger.

One day I showed up at my local airport to give a checkride that was scheduled and was a little surprised when I walked in to see a small child walking around the airport terminal building completely naked.

Around the corner, his dad appeard right after my initial greeting, saying, “Sorry, little billy had an accident.”

I didn’t know it just yet, but accident had been in the Cessna 172 we were going to be doing the checkride in.

The father was the CFI of my applicant, and the two of them had flown across Lake Michigan to me for his checkride that morning. Halfway across the lake, little Billy had released himself, overflowing his diaper and covering himself in excrement. Which they had no way to resolve until they got back on the ground. By the time of which he had managed to squirm most of it out on himself and the rest of his clothing.

Cleanup was needed when they landed. The poor applicant, as he told it, wanting to vomit most of the rest of the flight as they struggled to get to their destination.

They cleaned up the back seat of the plane, we did the checkride, I gave my truck keys to the instructor, and he went and got a new set of clothing for his kid while we finished up the checkride.

The applicant fortunatley passed, but we did keep the windows open for most of the flight in the hot summer air.

Okay, enough horror stories. Let’s talk prevention, because laughter is great, but dry pants are better.

First, pre-flight your plumbing like you pre-flight your plane. Eat light: Oatmeal, bananas, nothing that could stage a revolt. Avoid dairy if you’re lactose-intolerant—unless you enjoy milky surprises at Mach 0.2.

Hydrate wisely. Coffee is a diuretic and a laxative’s best friend. Stick to water, and maybe a ginger ale for settling.

Pack the essentials: Wet wipes, plastic bags (for emergencies), and yes, those travel johns that look like oversized juice boxes but save your dignity. They’re not glamorous, but neither is explaining stains to your mechanic. Even just having an extra set of clothes can be a good idea. Hopefully you never need them.

Know your body. If Mexican food sends you running, skip the tacos before takeoff. And for longer flights, plan stops. A quick pit stop (pun intended) can be a lifesaver.

In-flight strategies: Deep breathing, distraction techniques, even visualization—imagine a serene bathroom, not the void below. If it’s bad, divert. Better to explain a detour than a disaster.

And for the love of Lindbergh, maintain your sense of humor. We are all human. Our bodies keep proving this sometimes, sometimes at the worst time. These moments build character… and great stories for the hangar bar.

Fellow flyers, the sky is our playground, but sometimes our bodies remind us we’re still earthbound creatures. These gurgle moments test our mettle, but they also make for hilarious hindsight.

Fly safe, eat smart, and may your landings be happy—and dry. May 2026 bring you blue skies… and settled bowels.