Four Altar Steps

Have you ever been on an aircraft when the toilets were malfunctioning? I wish I could say I haven’t. On every transatlantic flight I’ve ever taken, by the time we reached our destination the TP, towels and soap had been spent, and the toilets themselves were backed up. The smell was beyond belief. (Of course, by that time none of the passengers smell that nice, either.) But bathrooms can cause problems on shorter flights, too. The morning of January 27, Flight DY1156 took off from Oslo headed for Munich. It only got as far as the Swedish border before it was forced to turn back because of an issue with the commodes. The irony is there were 85 plumbers on board. One reported, “We would have liked to fix the restrooms, but unfortunately it had to be done from the outside and we didn’t risk sending a plumber to work at 10,000 meters.”