Don’t worry: you won’t be walking down the street one day when a disgusting package from an airplane falls on your head, although this used to happen during World War II, when pilots threw bottles full of urine out of the windows. Fortunately, current aircraft technology is much more developed and what happens to the waste on an aircraft when you flush the toilet is much more hygienic than you might think.
The Boeings used in flights Commercial toilets use a system invented by James Kemper in 1975 and it consists of vacuum toilets that suck up the waste with a lot of force, so they require very little water, but they do lots of noise. Gizmodo explains that, by pressing the flush button in the plane’s bathroom, the waste is directed to a vacuum cleaner that sucks it up and leads it through the aircraft’s own sewer to a tank with a capacity of 200 gallons.
Said tank and the content that accumulates during the flight is handled by the ground crew who empty the container that has a non-stick coating . This technology is relatively recent, as it was installed for the first time in 1982, exactly 40 years ago .
Before that date and still until the middle of the 80, aircraft toilets used a blue deodorizing liquid called “Anotec” that pushed waste into storage tanks and required aircraft to fly with hundreds of gallons of this substance on board, which was also irritating to the eyes and skin.
The problem with this system was that many times there were leaks during the flight, so when leaving Out in the open, the debris turned into a chunk of blue ice that fell to the ground and could put a hole in the roof of a house or car. According to the same website, between 1979 and 2003 at least 27 packs of this nasty blue ice fell in the United States, and while it was a long shot and didn’t happen, the fact that it was possible for one of these ices to fall on someone’s head caused airlines will look for another option, such as the Kemper system.
So the next time you fly and use the airplane toilet, do it with confidence.
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