Airplanes Have A Surprisingly Advanced System To Deal With Poo

One of the great joys of living in a modern home is pooping in comfort. We probably take it for granted until we find ourselves in a strange, sketchy bathroom. It’s then when we yearn for home like never before. Nothing beats home base.

Which is one of the things that makes traveling a challenge. At home, you don’t have to consider it; you just go when you need to. On the road, it can get dicey. Smart people have been considering this difficulty for ages, and they’ve come up with some interesting solutions.

On the train, you’re encouraged to not flush while you’re in the station. Why? Because it just goes out on the tracks. That’s not really an option with an airplane, so they have a more high-tech answer to that age-old problem.

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Is there any place you want to be less than the airplane bathroom?

It’s cramped, it’s tiny, it’s uncomfortable, and did we mention small? How do people with claustrophobia even handle long-haul flights?

But you can’t say that airplane bathrooms aren’t a necessary evil. When ya gotta go, ya gotta go.

When you do manage to squeeze yourself into that airplane bathroom for that all-important number two, what happens to it?

You might recall stories of blue ice falling from the sky and smashing into houses.

Yep, that was waste from airplanes. The blue chemical deodorizer mixes with all the number ones and twos to give it that distinctive color, and on at least 27 occasions, it leaked from the plane, froze on the exterior, and then melted off when the plane returned to lower altitudes for landing. 

Not only is it unpleasant to have human waste fall in great globs from the sky, it’s also dangerous.

So clearly another system had to be adopted. Bye-bye blue swirl!