Aircraft Toilets

This is the toilet in a washroom on board a Northwest Airlines Airbus A330 en route from London to Detroit.

It's one of the toilets against the fuselage skin, not one of the only slightly more roomy center ones.

Why do your ears sometimes feel pressure changes when you flush an airline toilet? Because the vacuum flushing may cause the pressure altitude within the tiny toilet cabin to quickly jump 5 to 20 meters, say from about 2000m pressure altitude to 2015m.

For other odd A330 photographs, see my Gallery of Crash Dump Screens. The seatback entertainment systems run an embedded version of the Linux operating system. The OS is fairly stable, but the application is not.

This is one toilet along the fuselage centerline on a Boeing 747.

This is from a KLM flight from Amsterdam to Chicago.

The McDonnell Douglas MD-80 family of short to medium-range airliners are lengthened and updated versions of the DC-9. The MD-80 series entered commercial service service in 1980, the precusor DC-9 first flew in 1965.

The MD-80 series included the MD-81, MD-82, MD-87 and MD-88. This lavatory is in a Delta MD-88. This final MD-80 variant was introduced in January, 1986. It is very similar to the MD-82 and MD-83 with the exception of a "glass cockpit" (or electronic flight instrument system) and some updated cabin trim.

The MD-88 entered service with Delta in 1988, and this one was still in service in early 2012.

This is a toilet on board a Delta Boeing 767-300ER en route from Atlanta, Georgia to Athens, Greece.

I don't know what the engineers at Boeing were thinking....

This is the lavatory on a Boeing 767 operated by Alitalia, en route from Rome to Chicago.

See the slot for disposing of your used razor blades?

How is that going to be useful?

The port and starboard lavatories in a Douglas DC-7, as seen at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, USA.

The DC-7 was the last major piston-engined transport made by Douglas, built from 1953 to 1958. 348 were built, and 73 were still on the U.S. civil aviation registry in 2007!

Back in 1953, American Airlines charged $302 for a round-trip ticket — New York to Los Angeles and return.

U.S. Presidents Franklin Roosevelt through Eisenhower had personal aircraft, all of which were given distinctive names by their VIP users.

A USAF Boeing VC-137C, the military designation for the 707-320B, was built specifically for use by the President of the United States during the administration of John F. Kennedy. The aircraft had serial number 62-6000 and used callsign SAM 26000 (for "Special Air Mission") during routine flight, and Air Force One when the President was on board. The Boss would be seated at the table seen here, with a personal lavatory through the narrow doorway behind it.

This aircraft carried Kennedy and all of the next seven Presidents: Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton. Today it is at the WPAFB museum.

The stalls occupied by U.S. Larry Craig and the undercover police officer.

This is the men's room at Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport where U.S. Senator Larry Craig was arrested for soliciting sexual acts.

Click here to see the toilet itself, the entrance to the men's room and its location in the busy central concourse of the airport, and to read about the incident.

One airborne toilet that I have used and failed to photograph was the all-metal toilet on board a Syrian Arab Airlines Tupolev Tu-154m. Surely it was aluminum, although it had the look of stainless steel.

In February, 2011, the FAA issued Air Worthiness Directive 2011-04-09, ordering every U.S. airline to empty or remove the emergency oxygen tanks in all their aircraft lavatories. The change was kept secret from the public for a month.

The reason was security: the FAA said that oxygen generators in lavatories could be used by terrorists to take down airplanes by turning the canisters into explosive devices.

The FAA said that there had only been 12 incidents in the past ten years of pressure loss at cruising altitude. Just over one a year, they consider that a low enough risk for the flying public to run without being told about it.

In September, 2001, Boeing announced a number of the passenger improvements on board their 787 Dreamliner, as All Nippon Airways planned to start passenger operation of the new jet in October. These included larger windows, decreased pressure but increased humidity in the cabin air, and bidets with button control of various spray options.

Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions around the world. "2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box."

In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled Toilets of the World. It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs and commentary on other people's plumbing.

The Porcelain God: A Social History of the Toilet, by Julie Horan, contends that civilization began with the toilet.

Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, edited by Laura Noren and Harvey Molotch, has essays by anthropologists, sociologists, and architects on the importance of the toilet, especially for urban dwellers.

Latrinae Et Foricae: Toilets in the Roman World describes the toilets of the Roman Empire from Iberia to Syria, and from North Africa to Hadrian's Wall in Britannia.

Toilets, Bathtubs, Sinks, and Sewers: A History of the Bathroom, explains the history of personal cleanliness and hygiene to children in grades 5-8.

If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):

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