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Out of the Blue: Tales from the Lavatory Zone
By ELLIOTT HESTER On a United Airlines flight last month from Miami to Buenos Aires, Argentina, an enraged passenger (a Uruguayan banker, no less) kicked a hole in the cockpit door. He then stuck his head and torso through the hole and was clobbered with the blunt end of an ax, which was wielded by the startled co-pilot. The plane landed safely in Buenos Aires. The banker was taken into custody by U.S. authorities. While strange things happen in the cockpit, the weirdest events -- the real Twilight Zone episodes -- often occur in another airplane compartment. "A place," as Rod Serling might have said, "known as 'The Lavatory Zone.' " Cramped, grimy and occasionally malodorous though the lavatory may be, some passengers choose to use it to gain entry into the Mile-High Club -- that infamous if unofficial society of in-flight contortionists who have sexual relations far above the Earth. Last month passengers aboard American Airlines Flight 101 from London to New York experienced a Mile-High liaison of grand proportions. Flight attendants told the captain that two British men were acting suspiciously. According to the cabin crew, the two men made four or five trips to the lavatory. Each time they entered the cramped compartment together. According to Federal Aviation Administration officials, "Air Force officials overheard the captain's radio dispatch to American Airlines operations and sent two F-16s to intercept the jetliner over the Atlantic Ocean." The plane landed safely in New York, where authorities detained the two men. Police say the men admitted smoking crack cocaine in the lavatory. They also admitted having sex there. A fellow flight attendant told me of another embarrassing sex-in-the-lav story. Soon after a man and woman entered the lavatory together, a flight attendant call button rang. It rang again and again, in a rhythmic pattern that was not unlike the bell at a train crossing. Realizing that the call emanated from the bathroom the couple had entered, and that the call button was being bumped repeatedly during the throes of passion, flight attendants stood outside and waited. When the door finally opened, the red-faced couple was presented with a bottle of champagne. Scandinavian officials have been denying a report, carried by Reuters, the BBC and other news agencies, that after using the toilet aboard one SAS jetliner, an American woman made the mistake of flushing before standing up. News reports said the woman had become wedged in the toilet seat by the powerful vacuum action of the 767's flushing mechanism. According to an SAS spokeswoman quoted in the original report, "She was stuck there for quite a long time (and) and had to sit on the toilet until the flight had landed, so that ground technicians could help her get loose." While this story is now in dispute, a fellow attendant for my airline told me of having to deal with a similar event on one of our company's flights. This passenger also had to be helped off the seat by ground mechanics. I have had my own embarrassing lavatory experience: During one flight to the Caribbean, I stood before the toilet on a Boeing 727, pants around my ankles, answering the call of nature. But before I could, I seemed to float toward the ceiling in a slow-motion ascent that, for a moment, made me think I was dreaming. With my back pressed high against the lavatory wall, neck bent against the ceiling, I was at the mercy of God and aircraft dynamics. We had hit an air pocket, just the event that passengers wear their seat belts to guard against. While I could remember loving this same feeling while I was a child on an amusement park ride, I was not loving my experience in the 727 lavatory. In the next split second, I watched in horror as a couple of gallons of d-germ fluid came splashing out of the toilet. (D-germ is the pungent blue chemical that swishes around the toilet bowl after every flush. It's designed to break down waste and mask unpleasant odors; it has an odor all its own.) This was a Monty Python sketch come to life. My trousers became soaked with d-germ. The airplane suddenly regained its composure. Gravity re-established its grip. My feet hit the floor and I came sprawling through the lavatory door. Nobody on the plane was injured. Everyone, including my fellow crew members, had been wearing seat belts. Startled but only slightly bruised, I strapped myself into the jump seat, another sad and lonely traveler in the Lavatory Zone. -- Elliott Hester flies for a major U.S. airline. His book, Plane Insanity: A Flight Attendant's Tales of Sex, Rage, and Queasiness at 30,000 Feet, was published recently by St. Martin's Press.
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From the Times Travel page
From the AP |
