dingducky
3rd Jun 2001, 07:00
its under Freight Pilots Read This in rumours and news.
The Exploding Toilet and Other Embarrassments
Not all mistakes are fatal. Some are worse.
Remembering the blue volcano with Patrick Smith
The old adage, however tired, defines the business of flying planes as
long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Moments of
sheer terror AND RIDICULOUSNESS, maybe, are equally as harrowing. One young
pilot, when he was twenty-two and a flight instructor out at Hanscom Field,
just west of Boston, and trying to impress the pretty Christine Collingworth
by taking her up for a twilight sightseeing circuit in a friend’s Cessna,
highlighted the seduction by whacking his forehead into the jutting metal
pitot tube hanging from the 172’s wing. Earning himself a famous "Cessna
dimple," so he chose to think, would be the stupidest thing he’d ever do in
or around an airplane.
That was more than a decade ago, and a long way from this same pilot’s
mind during a recent cargo flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Cincinnati.
It’s eleven p.m. and the airplane, an old DC-8 freighter loaded with fifty
thousand pounds of pineapples, is somewhere over the Bermuda Triangle. The
night is dark and quiet, void of moonlight, conversation, and for that matter
worry. The crew of three is mesmerized as usual by the calming drone of
high-bypass turbofans and the deceptively peaceful noise of five-hundred
knots of air cleaving past the cockpit windows. Such a setting, when you
really think about it, ought to be enough to scare the living crap out of any
sensible person. We have no business, maybe, being up there, participants in
such an inherently dangerous balance between naïve solitude and instant
death, distracted by paperwork and chicken sandwiches while screaming along,
higher than Mount Everest and at the speed of sound, in a forty year-old
assemblage of machinery. But such philosophizing is for poets, not pilots,
and also makes for exceptionally bad karma. Neither poetry nor any kind of
mystical rumination is in the job description for these three airmen,
consummate professionals who’ve long ago sold their souls to the gods of
technology and luck.
One of these consummate professionals is a 34 year-old from Massachusetts.
He’s been flying planes since he was 16, but has seen his career stray oddly
from its from its intended course, his visions of flying gleaming new
passenger jets to exotic ports-of-call have giving way to the much coarser
world of air cargo — to sleepless, back-of-the-clock timetables, the greasy
glare of warehouse lights and the roar of forklifts, realities that have
aroused a low note of mild disappointment that rings constantly in the back
of his brain.
He gets up from the second officer’s seat and walks out of the cockpit,
the door. Here he enters the only other area accessible to the pilots in
flight, the small entryway alcove containing a lavatory, oven, cooler, and a
life raft. His plan is simple enough — to get himself a Diet Coke, or, to be
international about things, since we’re coming from the land of
paycheck-fattening "override" pay and a king’s ransom worth of per diem, a
Coca-Cola LIGHT, the extra-sweetened, less-carbonated version of our own
domestic product. The soft drinks are in a cardboard box on the floor, a
six-pack strapped together with one of those clear plastic harnesses so
dangerous to sea turtles and small children. These plastic rings, he
recalls, are banned at home, but apparently perfectly legal in Puerto Rico,
where there are, of course, lots of sea turtles and small children. The
pilot is thinking about this, weighing the injustices of the world,
philosophizing, daydreaming, ruminating — things that, again, his manuals
neither command nor endorse for perhaps good reason.
He unstraps a Coke and decides to put the remaining ones in the cooler,
where they are supposed to be in the first place. The cooler, a red,
lift-top Coleman that you’d buy in Sears, sits in front of the lavatory and
is packed with bags of ice. The pilot drops in the cans, but now the cooler
will not close. There’s too much ice. One of the bags will have to go. So
he pulls one out and shuts the lid. Decisions, decisions: which checklist do
I initiate? Which shutoff valve do I yank closed? Which breakers do I pull?
Which buttons do I press to keep us alive and this contraption intact? What
to do, now, with an extra, sopping wet bag of ice? Well, the pilot will do
what he ALWAYS does with an extra bag of ice. He will open the bag and dump
it down the toilet. This he has done so often that the sound of a hundred
cubes hitting the metal bowl is a familiar one.
This time, though, for reasons he hasn’t realized yet, there are no cubes;
or, more correctly, there is one huge cube. He rips open the bag, which is
greenish and slightly opaque, and out slides a single block of ice, probably
three pounds worth, that clatters off the rim and splashes into the bowl.
There it is met, of course, by the caustic blue liquid one always finds in
airplane toilets, that strange chemical cocktail that so efficiently, and
brightly, neutralizes our usual organic contributions to bathroom plumbing.
The fluid washes over the ice. He hits the flush lever and it’s drawn into
the hole and out of sight. He steps out of the lav holding the empty bag and
worrying still about the dangers of plastic rings, picturing some poor
endangered hawksbill choking to death. It’s just not fair. And it’s now
that the noise begins.
The pilot hears a deep and powerful burble, which immediately repeats
itself and seems to emanate from somewhere in the bowels of the plane. It’s
similar to the sound your own innards might make if you’ve eaten an entire
pizza or, perhaps, swallowed Drano. It grows louder. The pilot stops and a
quick shot of adrenaline pulses into his veins. What was THAT? Then there’s
a rumble, a vibration passes up through his feet, and from behind comes a
loud swishing noise.
He turns and looks at the toilet. But it has, for all practical purposes,
disappeared, and where it once rested he now finds what he will later
describe only as A VISION. In place of the commode roars a fluorescent blue
waterfall, a heaving cascade of toilet fluid, thrust waist-high into the air
and splashing into all four corners of the lav. Pouring from the top of this
volcano, like smoke out of a factory chimney, is a rapidly spreading pall of
what looks like steam. He closes his eyes tightly for a second, then reopens
them. He does this not for the benefit of unwitnessed theatrics, or even to
create an embellishing detail for eventual use in a story. He does so
because, for the first time in his life, he truly DOES NOT BELIEVE what has
cast itself before him.
The fountain grows taller, and he sees now that the toilet is not actually
spraying, but BUBBLING — a geyser of boiling, lathering blue foam and thick
white fog. And suddenly he realizes what’s happened. It was not a block of
ice, exactly, that he fed to the toilet. It was a block of DRY ice.
To combine dry ice with ANY sort of liquid is to initiate the turbulent,
and rather unstoppable, chemical reaction now underway in front of our
unfortunate friend. The effect is similar to dumping water into a Fryolator,
an exciting experiment those of you who’ve worked in restaurants have
probably experienced. The boiling oil will have nothing to do with the
water, discharging its elements in a violent surge of bubbles. Normally, on
those rare occasions when the caterers employ dry ice, it’s packed apart in
smaller, square-shaped bags you can’t miss. Today, though, an extra-large
allotment was stuffed into a regular old ice cube bag — three pounds of solid
carbon dioxide mixing quite unhappily with a tankful of acid.
Within seconds a blue river begins to flow out of the lav and into the
entryway, where a series of tracks, panels, and gullies along the floor split
it into several smaller rivers, each leading away to a different nether
region beneath the main deck of the DC-8. The liquid moves rapidly along
these paths, spilling off into the corners and crevasses. It’s your worst
bathroom nightmare at home or in a hotel, clogging up the ****ter at midnight
and watching it overflow. Except this time it’s a Technicolor eruption of
flesh-eating poison, dribbling between the floor seams of an airplane at
33,000 feet, down into the entrails of the beast to freeze itself around
cables or short out bundles of vital wiring. The pilot once read a report
about a toilet reservoir somehow becoming frozen in the back of a 727. A
chunk of blue ice was ejected overboard and sucked into an engine, causing
the entire engine, pylon and all, to tear from the airframe and drop to
earth.
And the pilot knows his cataract is not going to stop until either the CO2
is entirely evaporated or the tank of blue death is entirely drained.
Meanwhile, the white steam, the evaporating carbon dioxide, is filling the
cabin with vapor like the smoke show at a rock concert. He decides to get
the captain.
Our captain tonight, as fate would have it, is a boisterous and slightly
crazy Scandinavian named Jens. Jens is a tall, square-jawed Norwegian with
graying, closely cropped curls and an animated air of fiery, charismatic
cocksure. Jens’ is one of those guys who makes everybody laugh simply by
walking into a room, though whether or not he’s trying to is never made
entirely clear. He is sitting in the captain’s chair. The sun has set hours
ago but he is still wearing mirrored Ray-Bans.
"Jens, come here fast! I need your help."
Jens nods to the first officer, unbuckles his belt and moves quickly
toward the cockpit door. This is an airline captain, a confident
four-striper trained and ready, whatever pretensions of insanity he might
provide for the sake of a good time, for any assortment of airborne calamity
— engine failures, fires, bombs, wind shear. What will he find back there?
Jens steps into the entryway and is greeted not by any of a thousand
different training scenarios, but by a psychedelic fantasy of color and
smoke, a wall of white fog and the fuming blue witch’s cauldron, the outfall
from which now covers the entire floor from the entrance of the cockpit to
the enormous nylon safety net that separates the crew from its load of
pineapples.
Jens stares, then turns to his young second officer and puts his hand on
his shoulder, a gesture that is one of both fatherly comfort and surrendering
camaraderie, as if to say, "Don’t worry son, I’ll clean all this up," or
maybe, "Down with the ship we go, my friend." Then he sighs, gestures toward
the fizzing, angrily disgorging bowl and says, with a tone of surprisingly UN
ironic pride: "She’s got quite a head on her, doesn’t she?"
But what can they do? And in one of those dreaded realizations pilots are
advised to avoid, that insulation between cockpit calm and atmospheric
anarchy looks thin indeed, the blue juice eating away at the thin metal
barrier. An extrapolated vision of horror: the riveted aluminum planks
bending apart, the wind rushing in, explosive and total depressurization,
death, the first airliner — no, the first vehicle — in history to crash
because of an overflowing toilet. Into the sea, where divers and salvage
ships will haul up the wreckage, detritus trailing from mauled,
unrecognizable pieces while investigators shake their heads. At least, he
thinks, odds are nobody will ever know, the cold ocean carrying away the
evidence. He’s good as dead, but saved, maybe, from immortal embarrassment.
A dash of mystique awaits him, the same that met St. Exupéry at the dark
bottom of the Mediterranean, another lousy pilot who got philosophical and
paid the price. Maybe he blew up the toilet too. Probable cause: unknown.
"Call flight control," commands Jens, hoping a dose of authority will
enact some clarity into what is obviously and hopelessly absurd. "Get a patch
with maintenance and explain what happened."
He rushes back to the cockpit to call the company’s maintenance staff in
Cincinnati. He fires up the high frequency radios, small black boxes that
can bounce the human voice, and any of its associated embarrassments, up off
the ionosphere and halfway around the world if need be. He will announce his
predicament to the mechanics, but also to any of dozens of other airplanes
who happen to be monitoring the same frequency. Even before keying the mike
he can see the looks and hear the wisecracks from the Delta and United pilots
in their state-of-the-art 777s, Mozart soothing their passengers through Bose
headsets, flight attendants wiping down the basins, while somewhere in the
night sky three poor souls in a Cold War relic are trapped in a blue
scatological hell, struggling helplessly with a flood of excrement and
chemicals.
"You say the TOILET EXPLODED?" Cincinnati is on the line, incredulous but
not particularly helpful. "Well, not sure. Should be okay. Nothing below
the cabin there to worry about. Press on, I guess." Thanks.
Jens has grabbed the extension wand for the fire extinguisher — a hollow
metal pole the length of a harpoon — and is shoving it down into the bowl
trying to agitate the mixture to a stop. Ten minutes have passed by now, and
a good ten gallons have streamed their way onto the floor and beyond. Up
front, the first officer has no idea what’s going on. Looking behind him,
his view mostly blocked by the circuit breaker panels and cockpit door, this
is what he sees: a haze of white odorless smoke, and his captain yelping with
laughter and thrusting at something with a long metal pole.
Our pilot stands aside, watching Jens do battle. This was a little kid
who dreamed of becoming a 747 captain for Pan Am, the embodiment of all that
was, and could still be, elegant and glamorous about aviation. And poor
Jens, whose ancestors ploughed this same Atlantic in longboats, ravenous for
adventure and conquest, a twenty-first century Viking jousting with a broken
toilet.
So it goes, and by the time the airplane touches down safely, it’s
plumbing finally at rest, each and every employee at the Cincinnati cargo
hub, clued in by the amused mechanics who received our distress call, already
knows the story of the idiot who poured dry ice into the crapper. His socks
and hundred-dollar Rockports have been badly damaged, while the cargo net,
walls, panels and placards aboard N806DH are forever dyed a heavenly azure.
The crew bus pulls up to the stairs, and as the pilots step on board the
driver looks up and says excitedly, "So are you the guys with the toilet?"
- coypright 2001 Patrick Smith
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A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.