RE: Toilet waste disposel in mid-flight
A bit more research for you –
In the 1930’s the World Health Organisation (or whatever their name was in their day) compiled a study of worldwide Cholera outbreaks and discovered that there was an increased risk underneath the then used air routes. Whether this was genuinely true or not I don’t know but the outcome was a ban on all overboard toilet dumping by aircraft. As a result there has been no commercial aircraft with the facility to manually dump the latrines for at least 60 years. If (and I must emphasise the IF) there has genuinely been human waste that has fallen from an aircraft it can only be residual dribble from a stuck valve that has been frozen and then fallen off as the temperature rises as the aircraft descends to land. The airline has no control over this and the quantities involved will be minimal as the freezing of the resiue in the climb quickly blocks any leak.
Now consider this. On a 757 we typically aim to land with 4 to 5 tonnes of fuel left in the tanks to cover a diversion and subsequent holding. This fuel has spent hours being cooled to temperatures below minus 40 degrees centigrade and will take forever to warm up again. Now you descend through a wet airmass (i.e. a cloud layer) and this extremely cold fuel (and therefore entire wing) is now the perfect spot for all this moisture to accumulate as ice. As pilots we are obliged to switch on airframe anti-icing systems which shed the ice and gravity then does it’s thing. Then matey phones the papers and says something has just fallen through his shed roof and the tabloids think – great, an opportunity to be sensationalistic (is that a word?) and QED.
Feedback please.
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