What Happens To Your Poop On An Airplane?

If you’ve taken a long distance train ride, you know exactly where your poop ends up when you use the washroom.

It goes out of the train and onto the tracks below!

Fortunately (for most of us) this is not the case while flying.

Here’s why not:

• Airplanes are pressurised. Ejecting human waste outside would require modification to enable pressure “bulkheads” that would allow waste to exit, but prevent the entire airplane from depressurising. It’s easier to keep the poop onboard and deal with it on the ground.
• Thousands of aircraft fly over global skies daily. Having human waste fall on people on the ground is not something anyone wants, least of all the airlines. At cruising altitude temperatures run as low as -60 degrees C. Long story short: nobody wants a frozen (or partially melted) brown blob smashing into their morning coffee in the garden.

Throwing it overboard might save a little bit of weight, but it is not worth it.

How does it actually get handled? I’ll cover that in a future post.