A trip to the toilet in flight is inevitable. But what happens to all the waste in the air?
Rain reports appear from time to time. Back in July, a man in Windsor said he saw the sun in his garden when it began to rain from feces.
In May, Portsmouth locals reported “frozen poop” falling from the sky.
Is it even possible?
Can the excrement from planes simply be dumped on unsuspecting locals who are doing their business under the flight path of the plane?
What happens to our feces when we go to the toilet in the air?
Boeing aircraft use technology developed by James Kemper in 1974.
The technology has been in use since 1982, and has not been updated since because it has never needed improvement.
Toilets in airplanes have a vacuum at the bottom. Waste is sucked into the storage tank. And no, you can’t open that in the middle of a flight.
Even if they wanted to – and why – pilots and service personnel could not open the hatch from the plane.
The tanks can only be opened by ground workers after the aircraft has landed.
After opening the hatch, the waste is sucked into a separate tanker, leaving the tank completely empty.
A malfunction may occur, but there will still be no rain.
If a leak occurs, small icicles with traces of human waste can still fall to the ground.
But in the worst case, it will be no more than a few drops.
Icicles are blue from the content of disinfectant liquid, and they are called “blue ice”.
So what happened in Windsor and Portsmouth? This is a mystery.
But the British can be reassured that they will not be flooded with human waste falling from the sky.
Or at least, if so, now they know it can’t be from a flying plane.