Getting motion sickness in a general aviation aircraft is not a pleasant experience and conventional air sickness bags only make matters worse, according to Sporty’s officials.
Having to pull a folded garbage bag out of a small paper envelope and then trying to use a twist tie to seal it up while bouncing around on a hot summer day is awful. The Better Barf Bag was designed by pilots who understand this.
Made with thick, heat-sealed plastic, the bag seals in the liquid with a zippered, leak-resistant top. The 2.5-inch gusseted bottom helps to increase capacity while giving the bag a solid base to keep upright when placed on the floor, Sporty’s officials note. The dark color of the bag helps to mask the contents.
“It’s not a glamorous product, but it’s one that needs to be easy to use and effective,” says Sporty’s Vice President John Zimmerman. “Having some Better Barf bags on board is a great insurance policy. They contain the mess rather than creating a bigger one.”
The bags are available as a 10-pack for $6.50.
The proverbial “Better Mousetrap!” The best feature is the printed “Milestones of Aviation” timeline.
Apparently, if someone is feeling sick, once they begin reading this it will take their mind off of their misery. I suppose it beats pictures of playful kittens and unicorns.
But no matter how great the product, the cardinal rules are you must have the bag on board, and if someone exclaims, “I think I’m gonna be sick,” they’ve waited too long to deploy the device. The results are inevitable and ugly.
Two of my funniest memories of barf bags (yes, that is an oddly disturbing way to start a sentence) begin with the first and only time I’ve thrown up in an airplane….to date. It was a two-seat F-100 fighter, and as an ROTC student at the University of Georgia in the early 70’s, I was enjoying an orientation flight from Dobbins AFB in Marietta to a bombing range in SC. Once on the range, the pilot began a series of racetrack maneuvers, whereupon he dove at high speed to strafe a ground target, then pulled a high-G climbing turn up to a downwind leg, then turned base for another descending run on the target. Repeat ad-nauseam….pun intended.
My undoing, as for most young pilots, was overconfidence; in this case I believed that since I had several hundred hours in single engine props as a CFI, with time in an aerobatic Citabria, there was no need for a barf bag. HUGE MISTAKE. The only available substitute was my pair of nomex flight gloves.
Yep, filled them both, but there was the inevitable overflow on the jet’s seat. I will never forget the look of disgusted dismay on the crew chief’s face as he unstrapped me after parking.
Fast forward twenty-five years, and I’m taking a friend, his son and son’s friend Luke for a pleasure flight in a C-172. We’ve flown from the airport in Sonoma, CA, down over the Golden Gate bridge and are headed north for a lunch stop at the Two-Niner Diner in Petaluma. A few miles from pattern entry, young Luke in the back mumbles, “I don’t feel so good.” And just like that…..
After landing, we spent some time cleaning viscous red HAZMAT off of the rear carpet, which blessedly was red upholstery. The barf bag remained snug and dry in it’s seat-back home. Turns out on the way to their pleasure flight, my passengers had stopped at a “pick your own” strawberry patch, and Luke had really enjoyed the fruits of his labors….for a while anyway.
So there you have it. Barf can be funny, unless it’s your own, or your significant other’s, or in your airplane, or in a friend’s warbird, or…..you fill in the blank.
Leaving frequency for now….time for lunch.