The Mysterious Secrets of the Flying Toilet

Say hello to “Artois,” a refitted Farman F.60 Goliath and a good example of what an airliner looked like just after World War I. Allied aircraft companies, unaware of the Ilya Muromets (or simply unable to believe that such an advanced plane had been designed in Russia) had been developing their own multi-engine bombers of unprecedented scale, range, and carrying capacity, of which they managed to sell a handful before the Armistice. At that point, all the Allied governments cancelled their heavy-bomber orders and settled into various degrees of financial collapse.

Left with a huge-airplane-based industrial infrastructure that had not been fully paid off yet (and in some cases, entire squadrons of huge airplanes that the government had no interest in paying for), manufacturers like Vickers in England and Farman in France frantically began trying to convince anybody who would listen that long-distance airline travel was the opportunity of a lifetime, and bound to be fantastically lucrative, and would anyone like to buy 50 or so strategic bombers that had been hastily fitted out with seats, windows and -- since people are going to be in these planes for a long time, and since they will be civilians with a certain amount of money and class who will be averse to the traditional military practices of pissing out the side -- perhaps we could provide them with a bucket to crap in? Yes! A crap bucket! The company is saved.

The first mention of any sort of toilet in an aircraft comes from a Louisville newspaper of 1928 about the new seaplane airline service based on the Ohio river, comprised of long-range Sikorsky S-38s. Ever mindful of the needs of his clients, Sikorsky understood that passengers on long flights (and the S-38 had a range of over 700 miles) would need a toilet just like the crew of a Muromets bomber, and had a tiny chemical toilet and an enclosed room installed near the plane’s center of gravity. This amenity was considered civilized and noteworthy enough to merit space in the newspaper.

As more people started flying and more money went into the design of airplanes specifically for passenger service, discreet mentions of “water closets” or “washrooms” started appearing in the promotional material for airline companies and designers. You may note that in this cutaway illustration of a Short Empire airliner here not a lot of attention is drawn to the toilets themselves so much as the fact that the toilets exist and there is someone there to hand you a towel if you puke in your own lap.

World War II killed the need for flying boats by developing a great number of long-distance bombers, establishing advanced navigation techniques for ferrying airplanes across oceans. During the war, toilet technology became an embarrassing issue for Allied aircrews, who not only were flying at higher and colder altitudes than the old airliners, but were doing so in planes that had numerous holes in them so that gunners could fight off Axis fighters. This led to numbness and even frostbite.

Aircrew would be stuck in their freezing, cramped airplanes for hours, and inevitably, nature would call. Early model B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators came with chemical toilets, but these were almost immediately stripped out in favor of extra ammunition or fuel. This seems like it would be an unpopular decision until you remember that temperatures got so cold that exposed flesh would often stick to bare metal and tear off.

One final and especially puerile indignity that bomber crews learned about very quickly in the war: don't eat anything that gives you gas. The pressure differential between your intestines and the outside air at operating altitudes was enough to turn an innocuous fart into a sudden and traumatic medical event which nobody else on the airplane would be able or even particularly willing to help you with. If the pressure difference was severe enough, one could in fact fart oneself to death.

Luckily for gassy aircrew and the ground staff who had to clean up after them, Boeing introduced the B-29 Superfortress to the Pacific Theater in May 1944, which featured the first cabin pressurization system to be applied to an Allied bomber. This meant that the airmen could actually wear BDUs and lounge around in climate-controlled comfort, musing quietly on the fact that if anything went wrong with one of the Superfort's many cutting-edge semi-experimental systems, they would find themselves plummeting into the trackless ocean hundreds of miles from help, parachuting into the virulently xenophobic country they had just dropped incendiary bombs on, or ending up in unmapped and unmappable jungle islands filled with actual literal cannibals. If they were overly troubled by this situation, they could retire to the chemical toilet and take a few therapeutic terror-dumps without freezing to the seat or exploding.

Further development by Boeing begat the C-97 transport and the Boeing 377 airliner. Civilian passengers could now fly comfortably above the turbulence of lower altitudes while remaining warm, unexploded, and often hammered, as 377s included full cocktail bars in the forward areas of their lower-pressure hulls, along with not just toilets but dressing rooms.