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In the 2001 adventure-comedy movie Joe Dirt, the titular character proudly carts around a large rock-like object he falsely believes to be his lucky meteorite. In explaining that the object is no meteorite but is, instead, a large ball of shit, an appraiser tells Dirt that airplanes dump their toilets at 36,000 feet and the stuff freezes and falls to Earth. This is not, strictly speaking, true. It is true that frozen globules of poop can and have fallen from airplanes, but this is not by design. All commercial airliners currently use one of two basic toilet systems, and neither of them is designed to release waste during a flight. Both modern vacuum flush airplane toilets and older models that store waste in a blue deodorizing chemical dispose of it on the ground. There is no way to jettison the contents of the lavatories during a flight, Patrick Smith, a pilot and author of the book Cockpit Confidential, told the Telegraph in 2022. At the end of a flight, the blue fluid, along with your contributions to it, are vacuumed into a tank on the back of a truck. Prior to the invention of the vacuum toilet, which uses the pressure differential between the cabin in a plane and the atmosphere outside to create high-suction, low-liquid flushes — airplane bathrooms were similar in nature to Porta Potties. In 1982, Boeing introduced the first vacuum flush toilet, which greatly reduced the amount of stored liquid required for processing and transporting human waste. Both forms of toilet are still in operation, and in both cases, the waste material is removed by an airport's ground staff. It is at this stage that things can potentially go wrong. A 1980 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) memo to airlines highlighted the risk of falling clumps of waste material that could result from poor maintenance of lavatory systems: Waste leakage has been a documented problem for air travel for some time. In 1991, for example, the FAA launched an investigation aimed at figuring out which airlines were responsible for dumping ice bombs in their approach to Kennedy and La Guardia airports in New York. As reported by The New York Times: Such events are rare — and getting more rare — thanks to the vacuum flush toilet, according to a 2018 interview with pilot and aviation lecturer Ron Bishop: Because such events stem from improper maintenance or faulty parts involved in aircraft lavatory systems and not from an intentional design to jettison waste into the atmosphere, the claim that human waste is released directly into the air during a flight is False.
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