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When Airplane Toilets Malfunction

Hey, who wants to read an article with the phrases "blackish-green liquid" and "excrement had leaked out?" How about a version with "some black liquid, black oil came off on her face" and "there was quarter-sized, nickel-sized, dime-sized drops all over"? No one? Then allow us to summarize.

A Long Island couple was enjoying the unusually mild Northeastern winter we've been having by spending the evening on their deck. Their otherwise idyllic lounging was disrupted by black semi-liquid sludge that came falling from the sky on top of them, and which turned out to be incompletely frozen waste dropped by an overhead airplane.

According to the local CBS affiliate, they "want answers" as to why this happened to them (apparently they're not satisfied by the idea that the universe just wanted to make a cosmic punchline out of them that day). Money quote: "She says 'oh my God it’s raining' I said 'No it’s not'". Can you imagine?

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Too Fat for an Airplane Bathroom; the Overweight Passenger Debate Continues

The debate over whether or not overweight passengers are safety risks onboard flights is only just beginning, and it is a topic that carries much heft (slight pun intended) among airlines.

Onboard a recent flight, we witnessed a grossly obese man (very similar to the one pictured above) being ushered through economy, through business class and through first class to reach the first class lavatory. The reason? He could not fit into the smaller bathrooms in the lower classes, and a flight attendant was needed to give him permission and lead him to the first class ones, into which he only barely fit.

It was obviously an embarrassing scene for both the passenger and the flight attendant, and we wondered: what would have happened if he still couldn't maneuver inside of the first class toilet? Frankly, it was a demonstration of why overweight passengers are barred from sitting in emergency rows—that over-wing exit isn't the largest trapdoor. Perhaps a good test of checking whether a larger passenger is okay to sit in the emergency row is to see if they can comfortably enter the economy bathroom stall. Or is this too harsh? What do you think?

Related Stories:
· Fat people barred from airplane exit rows [DailyFinance]
· Time for another debate about obese passengers [Jaunted]
· Overweight Passengers [Jaunted]

[Photo: the infamous TwitPic]

Airplane Bathrooms / Lufthansa A380 First Flight / FRA / Lufthansa / A380 / XFW / Jaunted Reporting Live / Lufthansa A380 / First Class Travel / Toilets / → All Tags

Lufthansa's A380 First Class Has the Airplane Toilet of Our Dreams

We're literally just coming down from our first Lufthansa A380 flight experience, and even though we were stuck with a middle seat in economy, we did manage to sneak around upstairs in the First and Business class sections.

In this A380 superjumbo plane, there's a plethora of new features that had us saying "WHAAT?! That is awesome!" A few of these include USB ports for charging or playing media from your mobile devices in all classes, touchscreen TVs with three channels of outside live view cameras, and massively upgraded bathrooms.

The latter, the bathrooms, were obviously most crazy-impressive in First Class, whose new design wasn't unveiled at all until yesterday, when we stepped onboard at Hamburg's Finkenwerder airfield, the private tarmac of Airbus. To see exactly what we mean by "crazy-impressive bathrooms," check out a video tour and our photo gallery after the jump!

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Airplane Bathrooms / ANA / Toilets / Airplanes / Airplane News / Airlines / Airline News / Japan Travel / → All Tags

ANA Announces Women-Only Airplane Lavatories

Japanese airline ANA seems to be developing a thing for tinkering with how their passengers use toilets. Last October they began asking passengers to pee before boarding the airplane. Now comes the announcement that they're setting up women's-only airplane lavatories (PDF) in response to "numerous requests from passengers."

The new policy goes into effect March 1st and will apply only to international flights, during which a single lavatory in the back of the airplane will be marked with a pink women-only sign. Exceptions to the policy include safety considerations, personal emergencies, and when there aren't a lot of women in the cabin. In the final case the crew will formally lift the women-only designation for the duration of the flight. All the other bathrooms remain unisex - there are no men's-only bathrooms.

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