Be honest, how many of you thought it just got immediately dumped out of the plane mid-flight…
A pilot has cleared up any uncertainty passengers may have about what happens when you flush your poo down a plane toilet mid-flight.
Some of you may have felt guilty when hitting the flush, fearful that some poor person on the ground was going to be hit with your business from 30,000 feet in the air.
Well, worry no more.
Pilot Garrett explained what happens to the content of airplane toilets in an informative video on TikTok.
He said: “When you’re on an aeroplane and you gotta go, where does it go?
“Did you know that whenever you flush the toilet on the aircraft, it actually doesn’t dump out into the population down below?
“It goes through plumbing to the rear of the aircraft and the seal compartments where the ground crew at the destination will remove all that waste.
“On a 747 – on a long haul flight – toilets can be flushed over a thousand times, creating over 320 gallons of waste. That’s a lot.”
@flywithgarrett Ever curious where it goes when you’re on the airplane? ??✈️
It turns out that this was pretty surprising news to many, who seemed to think that waste was just flushed out of the plane.
Two types of people took to the comments: those who were shocked by Garrett’s revelations, and those who were shocked that people would genuinely believe any airplane dumps its waste out mid-flight.
One TikTok user commented: “Wait ppl actually think it dumps out below?”
Another wrote: “Other people actually believe that it would get expelled from the aircraft to the population below? And if so, do these people vote?”
A third added: “It’s still perplexes me that people think it just dumps out of the plane.”
“Who even thought it drops below straight?” said another.
However, some users admitted that they genuinely thought this was how waste was disposed of from planes.
One person confessed: “Since I was a kid I used to think when over a sea the pilot flush it out. Omg.”
Another added: “Thank you for clearing that up. Hopefully now we can let the matter drop.”
It’s not unheard of for planes to just dump their waste onto the ground below though.
Spare a thought for one man in Berkshire, who had the entire contents of a plane toilet emptied over his garden last year.
The incident happened in mid-July 2021 when a plane passing overhead in Windsor – which is one of the main flight paths in and out of Heathrow – emptied its toilet.
The waste “splattered in a very unpleasant way” leaving his “whole garden and garden umbrellas” covered.
Lovely.
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