The servicing of aircraft lavatories is a subject that most people would not care to delve into deeply. However, waste disposal on aircraft presents some unusual challenges, interesting equipment, and of course plenty of opportunity for things to go wrong. One would think that the hands-on training in this area would be limited. However, the simplest things are sometimes the most difficult to get just right.
Over the years, lavatories in various places have been given different nomenclature. For instance, in a restaurant, you might inquire about the “rest room.” On a ship, you would search for the “head.” However, on an aircraft, you would definitely be looking for the “blue room.” This term derives not from the tacky wallpaper, but from the color of the fluid that is used to ‘’flush” the toilet. The fluid begins as 100% water, to which a very powerful blue dye and deodorant is added. This is responsible for the distinct color and hence the name.
In a ground-based toilet, the flush water is fresh each time, it is used only once. This would not be practicable in an aircraft due to the very heavy weight of the water that would be required to be carried aloft. Very early aircraft solved this problem in a simple way. Water was not even needed at all. A seat was provided (you can bet that sucker was cold!) and an opening underneath led to the great outdoors. “Out of sight, out of mind,” my mother used to say. Of course, in the early 1900s, the countryside was not quite so populated, and environmental pollution laws hadn’t yet made their debut. The phrase “heads up!” was probably coined around this time. Early trains used the same method. I never could understand why people would walk along train tracks. Oh, well.
More modern aircraft (circa 1960-1990) toilets work this way: Several gallons of blue fluid is pumped into the toilet system from a vehicle outside the aircraft. About five gallons of fluid would be used to start. I hate to have to tell you this, folks, but the first person in line is the only one who gets to flush with 100% water. Your fears are now confirmed! The powerful blue dye changes the characteristic yellow color to a soothing and illusionary navy blue. The deodorant is specially formulated to fool your nose as well. As the facilities are used, this reservoir fills up. You could see all this happening except for the device we affectionately call the “poop chute.” This is a stainless-steel funnel, shaped like an “L” that forms the bottom of the bowl. In fact, I’m sure you seasoned flyers have occasionally glanced down and found to your horror that the “chute” has been missing. Kind of gross. Just think about the lucky person who gets to put it back in place. “But the nice blue water looks so clean,” you might say. ‘’Yes, Virginia, it does look that way.” You see, there is a screen filter that keeps the fluid from becoming lumpy. When the airplane pulls into the gate at the end of a trip, the friendly sanitation engineer takes over. We don’t really call him that, but hey, give the guy a break. The lavatories on large commercial aircraft are designed so that the contact, both physically and visually, between the waste and the person removing the waste is very limited. Two hoses are attached to an external receptacle, and the waste flows by gravity into the truck holding tank. The reservoir is rinsed and refilled with fluid. Pretty straightforward and not really too messy at all.
But wait! This chapter is titled “Honey Bucket Stories,” not “flushing out the reservoir from a truck stories.” You see, our Convair 580 was not being used in airline service. We flew to many cities that did not have airline service of any kind. We couldn’t count on having lavatory trucks available to service our aircraft. What’s a guy to do? Some enterprising engineer designed a self-contained system that was serviced from the inside of the aircraft. The toilet functioned in the same way as mentioned earlier, with one exception. When the flight was over and it was time to clean the airplane, some lucky individual, more often than not, yours truly, had the privilege of servicing the unit. This was a rather seemingly simple task. The entire top of the unit was hinged from the rear. I would lift the front end, and this would expose the inner workings of the unit. Inside was a “bucket,” a fiberglass cube about eighteen inches on each side with a handle that was attached to both sides. On top, there was a hole about six inches in diameter. On a convenient clip on the side was a cover that you placed onto the open hole to cover the contents and keep it from sloshing out as you carried the “Honey Bucket” outside. One only had to accidentally peer into the full bucket once to instantly devise an ‘’eyes closed” method. Each of us had our own personal technique. Basically, you would check out the general layout of all the parts and then, without looking, open the top of the unit, remove the cover from the clip, and place it over the hole, then open your eyes. So far, so good.
A full ‘’bucket” could hold about ten gallons. This presented several problems, as that sucker was heavy! Early in my career, Bill Lafferty (our Chief Pilot) had warned me that the worst thing 1 could ever do was to drop the bucket while carrying it out of the airplane. If this happened and the contents spilled out on the $10,000 carpet, I would be beheaded on the spot. I took this admonition very seriously. It had apparently happened years ago when the handle broke mid-cabin. The unfortunate aviator had not realized it when he awoke that morning, but it was to be his last day on the job. This worry led to the technique we called “the two-inch rule.” Simply stated, the bucket was never carried more than two inches above the floor. In this way, if the handle broke, the fall would be relatively minor. Have you ever carried 70 lbs. from a little wire handle, bent over at the waist? Not too much fun. All the way from the back of the airplane, about 40 feet, to the front and then down the steep stairs, one step at a time.
Oh, I forgot to mention it, but we had two blue rooms on this airplane. One in the front, about the size you would find on an airliner, and another in the rear of the airplane, this one about three times the normal size. This allowed enough room for passengers to change clothes in comfort. We tried not to use the smaller of the two blue rooms unless we had to for a very long flight. This cut the servicing of the buckets in half.
Now the real fun started. What do you do with that full bucket? The corporate flight ramps and service companies were not really set up to handle this type of job. It was a lot easier when there were ramp guys around to help clean and service the airplane. We used to pay these guys $20 to empty the trash and honey buckets. What they did with the waste, I have no idea, and I let them worry about it. However, many times we would end up in smaller cities that were not accustomed to having large aircraft stop over for service. Their line people could fuel the Convair 580, but we would do the cleaning and dumping.
There were several options for dumping the waste. Depending on location and the season, different techniques were used. The easiest and quickest method presented itself when we were at an airport that was near a wooded area. We would simply walk into the woods a little way, remove the cover, turn our head, and dump the contents onto the ground. Hey, bears do it in the woods. Everything in there should biodegrade rather quickly. One winter, we were running many trips out of our home base in New Bedford, Mass. This was a fairly small airport, and we provided all our own service. There were no woods nearby, but in front of the ramp area was a huge field. As the ground was covered with several feet of snow, it looked very pristine. As we were into simplicity, we just walked a ways out onto the seemingly endless expanse of snow and dumped. No problem. We did this quite a few times over the course of that winter. In the spring, a rather embarrassing sight materialized. As the snow melted, little piles of blue colored paper seemed to rise like mountains from the white background. The airport manager was not amused, however. We switched to plan “B.”
The most common method and the one that was best environmentally as well as sanitarily was to use a normal toilet as a receptacle. This seemingly simple task was fraught with perils. An “eyes closed” method had to be developed to be able to keep one’s lunch where it belonged. There were two basic types of toilets in use at the time. The standard reservoir tank type like that found in your home, and the pressure type usually seen in commercial settings. We preferred the pressure type. The idea was to flush to establish a strong flow down and then dump our gallonage at the same time. Keep in mind that, as this was done with our head turned away, we had to judge how things were going by sound. Pour too fast and you risked the deadly overflow. Pour too slowly, and you could be standing there forever. You had to learn to pour just right (I’m thinking, “I went to college for this?”)
One day, I was at Washington National Airport, making the big dump. I always tried to
use an unoccupied restroom, so as not to “disturb” anyone. However, on this occasion, I was in a rush. I casually entered the restroom with 50 pounds of used blue water. One guy was standing at the sink washing his hands. He glanced up at me and then noticed what was in my hands. His smile faded, and he quickly finished and ran out. I guess he thought I was going to pour it into the sink or something. There were two stalls, one of which was occupied. Thinking nothing of it, I went into the other stall. I evaluated the layout, closed my eyes, removed the cover, flushed the toilet, and began dumping. Imagine the sound an elephant with dysentery would make standing in a shallow lake emptying its bowels. The guy next to me screamed. “Oh, Jesus! Buddy, you O.K.? Oh man! What’s happening?” At first, I did not realize he was speaking to me. I had my eyes screwed shut and I was trying to keep from hearing the sounds in front of me. As the stench made its way under the divider, the unfortunate fellow gagged. He ran from the room and never looked back. I did feel bad about that incident and tried never again to subject an innocent person to that treatment.
I had a really bad day in Redmond, Oregon. We had flown up from San Francisco, and it was a very rough ride. The airport was a rather small place, kind of a nice Mom-and-Pop operation. After the passengers were unloaded and were waiting to board a chartered bus that would take them to the hotel, I began cleaning up the airplane. We normally put the glasses into racks to be washed, and emptied leftover snacks into the trash. On one of the end tables, I came across one of our nice wooden serving bowls. The kind that was popular in the seventies. Teak or other nice hardwood that was originally used as salad bowls. We used them to serve nuts or chips. This particular bowl was filled with Jalapeno bean dip. I was rather annoyed as our host should have known better than to serve anything in these bowls that had to be washed out with water, since we didn’t have any available to clean up with. I picked up the bowl to clean it out with a paper towel and realized that the bowl was warm. I was wondering how he heated it up since we did not have any ovens. My “index of suspicion” was rising rapidly. As the aroma of vomit reached my nostrils, my brain belatedly reached the same conclusion. I reacted as you would expect; I instantly puked. I couldn’t believe that someone had gotten airsick and had thrown up into the nut bowl in front of six other people on the facing couches and then had left the mess on the table for someone else to clean up! I was furious. I stormed outside to the group of passengers and found our group host. I read him the riot act, punctuated by the aroma of my soiled shirt. The day was not going well. If I had known what was coming later, I would have packed it in right there.
After cleaning up the cabin and saving the worst job for last, I went in search of a place to dump the bucket. The only hangar at this airport was a small affair that was used by several small single-engine airplanes. It was meticulously cleaned and maintained by “Mom and Pop.’’ I took the bucket and found the only toilet around. This was someone’s personal toilet. It was neat and clean and was not intended to be used by the general public. It was a reservoir-type toilet, but it looked like it was in good condition and would function adequately. I proceeded with the now-familiar routine and began my pour. Everything was going well for several seconds, and then I heard a sickening sound. You have all heard it. The dreaded overflow! My eyes snapped open, and I immediately stopped dumping, but the damage had been done. I quickly glanced around, but there was not a plunger in sight. As I stood there helplessly watching this eruption from hell. I could only think of the work I had ahead of me to restore the bathroom to its former pristine condition.
Have you ever noticed the small signs that are placed by the toilets in airplanes, “Do not throw any foreign objects in toilet?” I guess someone figured that since the cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels was manufactured in Boise, it did not qualify as “foreign.” In the finest tradition of “out of sight, out of mind.” they had tossed it into the bucket.
When that cardboard tube got wedged into the toilet with all the other stuff on top, it caused an immediate stoppage. The reservoir was attempting to refill the bowl, and that contributed to the awful mess. In a situation like this, one has to do what one has to do. So, I did. The rest of the bucket? I dumped it in the woods.