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Skip to the Loo... in Mid-Air

Written by travelovacations.com    Wednesday, 20 February 2008

Toilets are the great democratizers on an airplane flight. First class, business class, back-of-the-bus coach: sooner or later, nature calls. It takes a lot of, um, stuff and blue goop to back up an airliner toilet. Until recently, though, we never seemed to give airline lavs much thought. Sure they were, and still are a mite cramped. They are not a good place to get caught when the "fasten seat belt" sign has been turned on. And by golly those new vacuum pumps can be an unpleasant surprise if you aren't careful when you flush. By and large however, or unless one is larger, airline toilets have pretty much tended to blend into the background of road warrior life. That seems to be changing. We all know that the airlines are packing more and more of us into their flying steel cigar tubes, offering fewer and fewer amenities while recording record profits. And as flights get more cramped and folks get more crabby, airline toilets are taking the brunt of the abuse. Smokers' wrongs For one thing, now that smoking has been outlawed on U.S. domestic flights, airline toilets have become the last refuge of the tobacco addict yearning to satisfy one of those oh-I-can-quit-this-anytime-I-want-to nicotine fits. The National Transportation Safety Board and NASA's Airline Safety Reporting System both document repeated cases of passengers trying to smoke in airline toilets, even though it's a federal offense in the United States. Brains all a-jitter and olfactory senses trashed, butt junkies sometimes forget that their cravings make them as easy to trace in a non-smoking cabin as a cheesed-off skunk wandering along a country lane. "Most people, when they get caught, say 'no, no, no it wasn't me.' But I can smell it," says Candace Kolander, a spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants who logged 11 years behind the drinks trolley and on her hands and knees searching for cigarette butts in toilets and paper trash buckets. "My biggest concern as a flight attendant is where they put out the butt" because of the fire risk, she says. (Good thing Candace wasn't on the Airtours flight from Malaga, Spain, to London last November 1 with Steven Handy, an unemployed British bloke who insisted on smoking in the plane's toilet. According to the BBC, flight attendant Fiona Weir caught him -- and then caught his broken vodka bottle on her head.) Harboring riff raff And there's this weird connection between airline toilets, air rage perps and other assorted riff raff. For example, last January the Associated Press carried this gem from Down Under: A 26-year-old Australian woman went nuts on an Air New Zealand flight from Sydney, Australia, to Wellington. She attacked a flight attendant who had tried to force to fasten her seat belt, ran to the toilet and locked herself in. Later she came out and attacked another flight attendant and then tried to bust open the rear loading door of the B-737. And according to a story on the Reuters newswire in late April, an airliner made an emergency landing in the central Russian city of Samara after a flight attendant found a note in the toilet saying there was a "terrorist" on board demanding to be flown to Iran. All 136 passengers, including four children, were safely evacuated from the Tupolev Tu-154 airliner, but security forces couldn't find any hijackers. "The incident appears to have been some sort of joke," a Russian official told Reuters. Talk about taking advantage of a captive audience. When you've got to go, you've got to go Short of a bomb, perhaps the surest way to get people thinking about the lav is to lock them out if it, or let it overflow. That's what allegedly happened to thousands of Northwest Airlines passengers last January 2-3 when a blizzard at Detroit's Metro Airport. The storm stranded about 30 Northwest flights on the tarmac, some for as long as nine hours. The airfield plow crews couldn't keep the gates clear, passengers and flight crews grew short on food, fresh air and patience, and the overused lavs took on a life of their own. Passengers that night on Northwest Flight 1829 from St. Martin had to deal with at least one overflowing toilet, as well as all the lavatories turning into ashtrays and dumps for empty beer cans and full diapers, according to the April 28 edition of the Wall Street Journal. (The Journal chronicled the flight's entire 30 hours from hell. It's worth a read, if only to be able to thank your lucky stars that you weren't on it.) It takes a lot of, um, stuff and blue goop to back up an airliner toilet. The Boeing 727s and 737s have 2-4 lavatories with individual, 16-gallon holding tanks. That usually takes care of between 110-147 passengers. The B-737 "Next Generation", has a vacuum waste system, with one 60-gallon holding tank for all lavatories for roughly the same number of flyers. Boeing 747-400 jets holding 415 passengers, the latest version of the original Big Mamas of the sky, have four sewage tanks that hold a total of 300 gallons of, um, stuff and blue goop. These are dimensions derived from experience about passenger needs. So under normal circumstances, "nobody thinks too much about the toilets, and that's the way we like it," says Gary Lesser, a Boeing spokesman. "It's sort of like food at a restaurant. If the food is good you tend not to notice, but if the food's bad, then you notice." When toilets go bad Somewhere in Washington, someone is concerned about the general health and welfare of airline toilets and the people who use them. The Federal Aviation Administration has a variety of rules about toilets, most of which have to do with safety. The FAA inspects aircraft to make sure the lav is wired right, if the plumbing works or the "no smoking" lights up. For example, the FAA says that "No person may operate a passenger-carrying airplane unless each lavatory in the airplane is equipped with a smoke detector system or equivalent that provides a warning light in the cockpit or provides a warning light or audio warning in the passenger cabin which would be readily detected by a flight attendant, taking into consideration the positioning of flight attendants throughout the passenger compartment during various phases of flight." And the FAA says that the ""Fasten Seat Belt" sign shall be turned on during any movement on the surface, for each takeoff, for each landing, and at any other time considered necessary by the pilot in command." That basically means that passengers can't use the toilets once a flight has backed away from the gate unless the pilot says so. And of course the pilot says no unless the safety of passengers is in question; walking around during takeoff is an obvious risk, anticipated turbulence less so. The FAA also says that cabin crews can decide whether or not to let you go to the toilet when your flight is stuck on the ground. The Department of Transportation is the official government receptacle of complaints about airline service issues from consumers. That includes airline lavs. Although if what they say is true, anecdotes of malfunction and misery about airline lavs represent the exception to the rule. "We do receive complaints from time to time about airline toilets, overflowing toilets, passengers in coach not being allowed to use the toilets in first class, things of that nature. But it's a very small number of complaints in terms of the number of complaints we get overall," says Bill Mosely, a spokesman for the DOT. "To put it in perspective," he adds, "looking from the start of 1998 to March (of this year) we received a total of roughly 12,000 complaints on airline service issues. Toilets are in a subcategory of that called inadequate facilities, which includes things like diaper changing, and there were only 104 inadequate facilities complaints (in that time period). So like I said, that's a relatively small number of complaints." DOT also concerns itself with handicapped accessibility to airline lavatories. Its Fly-Rights online publication details what people with handicaps have a legal right to expect from an airline. A right to a decent rest room? Northwest is the target of at least three class action lawsuits as a result of the debacle at Metro, but it's hardly the only target of passenger ire. All this anger spilled over into Congress last February as the House Transportation Committee held hearings to let passengers rant about everything from crammed flights to shoddy business practices, lousy service and, of course, overflowing toilets. At least three different versions of a "passenger bill of rights" have grown out of those hearings: One by the Clinton administration, one by Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., and one by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. All three pieces of legislation include rules that would require the airlines to provide emergency restroom services when flights are delayed for more than two or three hours. The legislation doesn't make clear exactly how the airlines are supposed to provide that emergency relief. And whether or not any of this means people will stop trying to sneak cigarettes, write bomb threats or jam dirty diapers down the drain remains to be seen.

Last Updated ( Monday, 25 February 2008 )