Airplane toilets are chemical

I will fight a new myth with this post. When you go to lavatories during flight, what you leave there is not ejected in the sky !

Many people beleive it is the case, but not. Doing so would lead to various problems. First, given the temperature oustide planes is approximately -50°C, anything would freeze, and any of your solid "production" would then fall as frozen piece. This could be unpleasant, if not dangerous for other planes.

The second issue would be to deal with a temporary and uncontrolled openning in the airplane pressurized envelope. This is the part of the fuselage that helps to maintain a constant air pressure to allow passenger breathing normally despite altitude. Any hole in that would leave air go out, making pressure and temperature falling.

So, no, the airplane toilets do not send anything outside. Instead, they are chemical. All what you leave is compressed and goes in a tank with a special product that helps containing odours and to stop the development of bacteriae.

During groud stops, the handling staff checks amongst other things the level of the tanks, and if they're full, or close to full, they have to drain it. As you can imagine, they double check all the tubes before doing... any leak would not be so friendly to clean.

Speaking about toilets, you should observe something during your next flight. It can be a 30 miuntes or 12 hours flights, this principle is always verified. As soon as the captain turns off the "Fasten seat belts" sign, there is systematically someone standing up within 30 seconds to go to the lavatories. Have a check.

One final word about plane toilets and common fantasies. In some movies, people are having sex in flight in the lavatories. I don't know how this would be possible, for at least two reasons: first is that the room there is hardly enough for a single people, so what about two ? and did you notice that there is always a queue to go in ? So how to go in two at a time, if possible ?