My best toilet door story involved an ex-RAF friend of mine who came out of the RAF and joined Laker Airways on the DC-10 about one month before I did.
We did our training sectors on (relatively) short sectors down to southern Europe and the Near East.
At this stage of the exercise, I have to explain that we had a wonderful training department and the training captains were excellent. However, there is always one. He was an ex-noncom RAF pilot who did not take prisoners and expected perfection.
So my friend is scheduled to do his very first sector on the DC-10 from UK to Spain. Naturally, he turned up super-early to get ahead of the game and all was going really well as far as he could determine until he realised not long before top of drop that he needed a pee.
He simply could not last until touch down so he asked "Sir" if he could go back for what our American friends call "a comfort break".
"Do you have to? Bloody hell! We are nearly there. Can't you hang on?"
Well, he had to go back and just outside the flight deck door were the two forward lavs. At each door was a queue of passengers.
So, my mate said, "Sorry about this but I am going to have to pull rank for I am needed up front".
The ladies in the queue were happy to let him in and my friend did his best to empty his bladder as quickly as possible. While he was in mid-stream, so to speak, he heard the throttles coming back. My God, we have passed TOD and I am in the loo thought he. This will not go down well with Sir.
He came out of the loo, thanked the ladies in the queue and then tried to get back into the flight deck.
Now I have to explain that up to this point the Company had spent an absolute fortune teaching all of us in the AA academy at DFW every single little detail of how a DC-10 worked. But no one had actually bothered to tell us how the doorhandle into the flight deck worked.
So, my mate, having thanked the ladies in the loo-queue, tried to get back into his office. Now, prior to 9/11, the door handle was fixed and all you had to do was to give it a tug and pull (a ball-joint).
My mate tried turning it to the right, he tried turning it to the left and finally in desperation gave the door a bloody great tug and pulled.
At this point, he went arse over tit backwards and ended up in the laps of three elderly ladies in the front row who stroked his hair and said something along the lines of "Never mind son"!
I think it would be fair to say that he did not feel at his best when he finally got back in his office.
Moving on; some years later I ended up working for an American Part 121 operator based at JFK. The FAA had introduced a locked flight door policy to prevent hi-jacking. At that time, the biggest threat was a Cuban with a can of petrol.
So, we got an ex-Laker DC-10 and I was commissioned by my boss to get some flight deck door keys. Unbelieveably, I found an original key in the flight engineer's drawer.
I took it down to Manhattan and found a "key shop".
"I want 36 of these" said I.
He was a bit reticent but, when I explained the problem, he happily made me 36 keys.
So the pilots, the flight engineers and the senior, back in the cabin were duly issued with a key.
It didn't take long.
A couple of weeks later, my flight engineer went back to the loo and forgot to take his key with him. Eventually, he decided to try his DC-8 key. Not only did that work but his B707 and B727 keys also worked!
I would have to say that the United States of America were completely unprepared for 9/11.