A Wee bit of humour

Some time back I was reading through some aircraft incidents journals and one of the entries rather caught both my eye and imagination. It related to an old people's home and Urinary Incontinence!

The staff at the home had a number of residents who had problems in the waterworks department. The solution was to have them fitted with something called a 'Transurethral bladder stimulator', a device which when activated cause the person them to empty their bladder.

What was causing some concern (and workload) was that fact that at certain times every person in the home who had one fitted urinated at the same time! The staff tried for ages to sort the problem and neither they nor the medical teams could work out the cause. The equipment was working well and nothing, it appeared, would ever be identified as the source of the problem. That is until one afternoon when just as an aircraft passed overhead on its way to East Midlands Airport they noticed that micturation was the sport of the moment!

The staff member noted the time and asked staff to keep notes as to other occurrences. As I recall it happened during weekdays. After a couple of weeks it was obvious that there was a pattern emerging and so the relevant aviation people were contacted and a correlation between their residents peeing and aircraft arriving some five minutes later was sought out. It didn't take too long to establish the link between one aircraft, a cargo carrier, and the peeing.

Flight paths were checked and it turned out that one of the aircraft's avionics (a transponder) was activated as they approached the home. The authorities asked the carrier to fly over the home (without transponder activated) and found that nothing happened. The aircraft overflew the home again, this time 'squawking' (i.e. transponder on and sending an identification code which is seen on radar screens by controllers). Bingo! The cause had been found - turned out that one of the aircraft had a faulty bit of avionics - they were home dry!

Happy Monday!