Toilets In Motion — Aircraft Toilets


Airbus 330 toilet.

The toilet in a washroom on board a Northwest Airlines Airbus A330 en route from London to Detroit.

One of the toilets against the fuselage skin, not one of the only slightly more roomy center ones.

Why do your ears sometimes feel pressure changes when you flush an airline toilet? Because the vacuum flushing may cause the pressure altitude within the tiny toilet cabin to quickly jump 5 to 20 meters, say from about 2000m pressure altitude to 2015m.

For other odd A330 photographs, see my Gallery of Crash Dump Screens. The seatback entertainment systems run an embedded version of the Linux operating system. The OS is fairly stable, but the application is not.


KLM Boeing 747 toilet.

                
One toilet along the fuselage centerline on a Boeing 747.

This is from a KLM flight from Amsterdam to Chicago.


Alitalia Boeing 767 toilet.

I don't know what the engineers at Boeing were thinking....

This is the lavatory on a Boeing 767 operated by Alitalia, en route from Rome to Chicago.

See the slot for disposing of your used razor blades?

How is that going to be useful?


DC-7 toilet, NASM, Washington DC, USA.

The port and starboard lavatories in a Douglas DC-7, as seen at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, USA.

The DC-7 was the last major piston-engined transport made by Douglas, built from 1953 to 1958. 348 were built, and 73 were still on the U.S. civil aviation registry in 2007!

Back in 1953, American Airlines charged $302 for a round-trip ticket — New York to Los Angeles and return.

DC-7 toilet, NASM, Washington DC, USA.

One airborne toilet that I have used and failed to photograph was the all-metal toilet on board a Syrian Arab Airlines Tupolev Tu-154m. Surely it was aluminum, although it had the look of stainless steel.


Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions around the world. "2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box."

In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled Toilets of the World. It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs and commentary on other people's plumbing.

       A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used.

How long have my Toilets of the World pages been around? I'm not exactly sure, although I'm pretty sure they started in the mid 1990s as a single page on a Purdue University server. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you see what that looked like as far back as January 17, 1999.

My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001, although the Wayback Machine didn't notice the one enormous toilet page until January 17, 2002. Some time soon after that it was split into categories, and they have grown ever since.

If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):

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