On the second night of the war in Afghanistan, a Espíritu B-2 lifted off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, flew west across the Pacific, bombed targets in Afghanistan, and landed at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Its two pilots had been strapped into the same twenty-five square feet of cockpit for more than forty-four hours.

Everything you would rather not think about happened during those forty-four hours. The crew ate. They drank. Their bodies did what bodies do. And every one of those functions had to be engineered for, because a stealth bomber has no galley, no lavatory and no room to stand up.

This is the part of long-duration flight that nobody writes a press release about. It is also, once you start pulling the documents, considerably better documented than you would expect. The CIA wrote a manual about it in 1962. The Air Force still carries a line item for it in its food-service regulation. And a good deal of what the internet repeats about it is wrong.

The forty-four-hour sortie, and the part everyone gets wrong

The number is real. The story usually told around it is not.

Air Force Magazine reported it in February 2002, close enough to the event to be treated as the primary account: six B-2s flew non-stop from Whiteman to Afghanistan and then recovered at Diego Garcia, and one of those sorties lasted more than forty-four hours, a record for a combat mission.

What almost every retelling adds is that the aircraft flew all the way back to Missouri on the same mission. It did not. The bombers landed at Diego Garcia, spent about an hour on the ground with the engines running, swapped in a fresh crew, and flew home with those new pilots at the controls. The forty-four hours belonged to one crew on the outbound leg. The airframes themselves stayed airborne far longer.

Mel Deaile, who flew that sortie, put the aircraft figure at more than seventy hours of continuous operation. He also gave the number that has since become famous, and it is worth attributing to him personally rather than to the Air Force, which only ever said "more than 44 hours".

That cot is the whole story of B-2 crew endurance in one object. It sits behind the seats in a compartment of about twenty-five square feet. It is not a bunk, and the aircraft has no second crew to hand over to. One pilot flies; the other sleeps, badly, a few feet away.

The rest discipline was set by the tanker schedule rather than by anything resembling a body clock. Both pilots had to be in their seats for air refuelling, which came round every four or five hours, so the two swapped places each time a tanker was met and slept in the gaps between.

What the Air Force will and will not say about the toilet

El B-2 has a chemical toilet. That much is confirmed. What is also confirmed, and rather more revealing, is that on the 2001 sortie it was not up to the job. Deaile has described the crew resorting to piddle packs instead, absorbent bags of the kind fighter pilots carry, and doing the arithmetic on how many pounds of solidified urine they would be landing with.

Solid waste is handled with less ceremony. Asked about it in 2021, an Air Force Materiel Command spokesman gave what remains the clearest official statement on the subject.

The same reporting surfaced an Air Force solicitation for a privacy screen on the B-52, whose wording is unusually candid for a procurement document: as the aircraft continues to fly long-duration missions, especially with mixed crews, there is a higher need for privacy during rest room activities.

Transport aircraft are better served. A C-130 has a urinal and a toilet with a curtain; the C-17 and the KC-46 have a proper lavatory with a lockable door. Combat aircraft have essentially nothing, and the gap widens the smaller the aeroplane gets. For a single-seat fighter there is no official provision for solid waste at all. Not a device, not a document, not a technical order. The Air Force’s bladder-relief programme addresses urine and stops there.

Even urine is harder than it sounds. An Eglin Air Force Base release describing ground tests of a new relief system listed the existing options plainly as adult diapers, holding it, or a bag system, and noted that using a bag requires unstrapping from the seat and the gear, a process that can take more than forty-five minutes. We covered the consequences of that, and the hardware now replacing it, in a separate piece on piddle packs, AIRUS and tactical dehydration.

A former B-2 pilot describes what flying the aircraft on a long mission actually involves.

The CIA wrote the manual, and it is stranger than the legend

El U-2 Dragon Lady poses the problem in its purest form. The pilot is sealed inside a full-pressure suit. There is no unzipping, no reaching in, no improvising. Whatever the body is going to do for the next ten or twelve hours has to be planned for before the canopy closes.

So somebody planned for it. In August 1962 the U-2 programme issued Project Headquarters Manual 50-1161-1, the U-2 Pilot Physical Maintenance Control Program. It was classified Top Secret and released in 2001, and it runs to twenty-one pages of what a pilot should eat, drink and avoid. Its section on food and liquid consumption says exactly what it is for.

The manual makes the diet mandatory for pilots flying ten or more consecutive hours and strongly recommends it above six. It bans alcohol in the twenty-four hours before take-off because of its dehydrating effect, and it warns against loading up on coffee, on the grounds that over-hydration before flight makes in-flight urination more likely and more difficult.

And yes, the famous pre-flight steak and eggs is literally in the document, printed as a suggested meal: orange juice, four to five ounces of lean broiled sirloin, two scrambled eggs, two slices of toast, butter, strawberry jelly, coffee. It is a suggestion rather than a mandate, which is a distinction the legend has long since lost. It is also worth noting that it belongs to the U-2, not to the SR-71, whatever the internet has decided since.

The most human detail in the whole manual is in its post-flight questionnaire, which asks pilots directly whether they defecated in flight, and whether they felt an urge to do so that became annoying to the point of serious discomfort. Someone, in 1962, was collecting that data.

The gastrointestinal reasoning is the manual’s own. The other half of the explanation, the one about the suit, comes from the CIA’s published history of the programme by Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach, which records that pilots pre-breathed oxygen for at least ninety minutes before take-off, and that once they were in their suits, eating and drinking became a major problem, as did urination. Both rationales are true. They are simply from different documents, and most secondary accounts fuse them into one.

Cinnamon Zapplesauce and the toothpaste tube

Sixty years on, U-2 pilots still eat out of tubes, and the hardware has barely changed in concept. The Air Force’s own description is the plainest: the containers are about the size of a tube of toothpaste, and they are fitted with a plastic straw designed to slip through a sealed port on the pilot’s helmet.

They are made in one place. The Army’s DEVCOM Soldier Center at Natick, Massachusetts, is the sole producer, supplying both the Air Force’s U-2 fleet and NASA’s ER-2s. The current menu runs to nineteen varieties, up from fifteen a decade ago, and Natick turns out roughly 28,000 tubes a year for a community of about a hundred pilots. Shelf life is three years at eighty degrees Fahrenheit, six months at a hundred.

The menu is not what you would expect from a spy plane. Beef stew and chicken a la king, yes. Also chunky apple pie, truffle macaroni and cheese, hash browns with bacon, key lime pie, and something called Cinnamon Zapplesauce. There is a caffeinated apple pie for the back end of a long mission. Every tube carries the same warning label: do not use if tube is swollen, which at seventy thousand feet is not a hypothetical.

And the cockpit does have a heater, the one piece of cooking equipment confirmed anywhere in this story. It is about six inches long and three across, and it works rather like a car cigarette lighter.

One thing that is no confirmed, despite appearing in a great deal of coverage, is a microwave or a refrigerator aboard the B-2. No Air Force fact sheet, command release or official publication mentions either. The best-sourced description of what B-2 crews actually carry is coffee, water, sandwiches, pretzels and pre-packaged meals, which rather implies nothing is being heated at all.

Steve1989MREInfo opens and tastes genuine U-2 tube food, including the pepperoni pizza and the key lime pie. It is the closest most people will get to the real thing.

The low-residue diet is still on the books

Here is the detail that turns a Cold War curiosity into a live piece of doctrine. Open DAFMAN 34-131, the current Department of the Air Force food service manual, and go to Chapter 9. Crewmembers are authorised a meal on any flight exceeding three hours including pre- and post-flight activity. Two hours’ notice is the minimum, and food service staff do not deliver to the aircraft; fleet services does that.

Then look at the table of authorised flight meal types. There are nine of them. One is listed as High-Protein, Low-Residue, priced at sixty-five per cent of the meal cost allowance.

The manual does not say who it is for or why, and it would be over-reading to claim a direct line from a 1962 CIA manual to a 2023 regulation. But the same meal, under the same name, for the same physiological purpose, is still a line item in Air Force food service today.

Staying awake, and what the Air Force actually authorises

Food and plumbing are the easy half. The hard half is being useful at hour thirty-eight.

Air Force Special Operations Command Instruction 48-1010, dated June 2022, is the most explicit public document on the subject. It confirms that the Air Force Medical Readiness Agency publishes an authorised list of stimulants, universally known as go pills, and sedatives, known as no-go pills. It states that taking them is a voluntary decision. And it sets the thresholds at which they may be offered: multi-crewed missions longer than twelve hours, and fighter, single-pilot or helicopter missions longer than eight.

Eight hours. That is the point at which a single-seat fighter pilot becomes a candidate, which tells you how much harder the problem is when there is nobody to hand the aircraft to.

What that looked like in practice was studied directly. An Air Force Research Laboratory report from 2004 followed nineteen F-16 pilots flying extraordinarily long combat sorties over Afghanistan and Iraq between December 2001 and June 2002, averaging more than four sorties a month of over eight hours each. Sixteen of the nineteen used five-milligram dextroamphetamine, all of them on the way home or before landing, averaging fewer than two tablets on a long sortie. Fifteen used zolpidem afterwards and slept an average of five and a half hours.

The report also records the cost, which is the part usually left out: seven of the sixteen who used the alertness aid reported difficulty sleeping afterwards. The pills move the fatigue rather than removing it.

None of this is exotic by the standards of the job. Aircrew nutrition is treated by the Air Force as a readiness issue rather than a welfare one, and the people who cook for them say so in exactly those terms.

Twenty-five hours, thirty hours, and the numbers nobody published

The 2001 sortie is the extreme. The routine is still long.

For Operation Odyssey Dawn over Libya in March 2011, Air Force Global Strike Command described a mission of more than twenty-five hours in which three B-2s delivered forty-five guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions, with Eighth Air Force coordinating four aerial refuellings for the three aircraft.

For Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025, the official numbers are narrower than the coverage suggests. Gen. Dan Caine told reporters the aircraft completed multiple in-flight refuellings throughout an eighteen-hour flight into the target area, and called it the second longest B-2 mission ever flown, exceeded only by those in the days after 9/11. A year later, Eighth Air Force said the crews returned home more than thirty hours later. The round-trip figure of roughly thirty-six or thirty-seven hours that circulated widely at the time appears in no Department of Defense release at all.

Nor, for that matter, does a refuelling count for that mission. The official language is "multiple", and "dozens and dozens of air refueling tankers" across a package of some 125 aircraft. Anyone quoting a precise number per bomber is guessing.

Coverage of what the Midnight Hammer crews did aboard the B-2. Note that the 37-hour figure in the title, and in most reporting, has never been stated in any Department of Defense release.

The B-2 is not alone in this. In 1996 the Air Force flew B-52 from Barksdale on what it described at the time as the longest distance flown for a combat mission, a thirty-four-hour, sixteen-thousand-statute-mile round trip. Note the hedges in the Air Force’s own wording, both of which usually vanish in the retelling: at that time, and longest distance, not longest mission.

The RAF was equally careful about Black Buck in 1982, when Avro Vulcans flew roughly sixteen hours and nearly 6,600 nautical miles to Port Stanley behind a fleet of Victor tankers. The RAF says the raid became, at the time, the longest bombing mission in history. That is the correct formulation, and it is the one to use.

The absence is the story

Spend long enough in these documents and a pattern emerges. The Air Force has thought carefully about what a crew eats. It has a nineteen-flavour tube menu, a heater, a nine-item flight meal schedule and a low-residue option that has survived six decades of regulation. It has thought carefully, if belatedly, about urine, with a bladder-relief programme and real hardware now in service.

About the other thing, it has thought almost nothing at all. There is a chemical toilet on the bombers and a bag everywhere else, and for a single-seat fighter there is no provision, no device and no document. The engineering answer to that particular problem, after seventy years of jet aviation, is still a diet.

Which is why the 1962 manual is the best artefact in the whole story. It did not try to solve the problem. It arranged for the problem not to arise, twenty-four hours before the canopy closed, with a steak and two eggs.

Sources: Air Force Magazine, February 2002; Mel Deaile, writing for the USO; Air & Space Forces Magazine; US Air Force and Air Force Global Strike Command releases; Department of Defense press briefing, 22 June 2025; CIA, U-2 Pilot Physical Maintenance Control Program, Project Headquarters Manual 50-1161-1, 1 August 1962; Pedlow and Welzenbach, The CIA and the U-2 Program 1954-1974; US Army DEVCOM Soldier Center, Natick; DAFMAN 34-131; AFSOC Instruction 48-1010; Schultz and Miller, AFRL-HE-BR-TR-2004-0014; Military.com; Royal Air Force.