=20 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SFGate. The original article can be found on SFGate.com here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=3D/c/a/2005/12/06/BUGQ9G3GP4= 1.DTL --------------------------------------------------------------------- Tuesday, December 6, 2005 (SF Chronicle) NEWS ANALYSIS/No law requiring U.S. airlines to provide functioning restroo= ms/Planes' broken lavatories fall into loophole Christopher Elliott, New York Times Next time you board a plane, consider visiting the restroom first. The passengers on a recent United Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Sydney probably wish they had. For reasons that are still a little murky, the toilets on the Boeing 747 began to clog up about halfway through the 14-hour flight. By the time the plane landed, only two of 15 were working. What is noteworthy about the problem is not so much that it happened -- although an almost complete failure of an aircraft's restroom facilities remains rare -- it is that flying many aircraft with nonworking toilets is completely legal. Unbelievable as it may sound, the only law on the books that apparently requires an aircraft to fly with a working restroom, the Air Carrier Access Act of 1986, applies only to planes with more than one aisle that were delivered or refurbished after April 1992. That is a huge loophole, given the number of jets that are older or have just one aisle. Plus, federal law seems to be mum when it comes to the all-important passenger-to-toilet ratio on a plane. Of course, airlines do not exploit this regulatory lapse. United, like other domestic and international airlines, operates all its planes -- no matter their age or size -- with a full complement of working restrooms. Most of the time. "If a lavatory is malfunctioning, we will close it down and refer customers to an alternative one on the plane," said a United spokeswoman, Robin Urbanski. "If more than one lavatory is malfunctioning, we typically divert the plane." What exactly does the law say about airborne restrooms? Aside from the A= ir Carrier Access Act, not much. Federal law makes some passing references to toilets (for example, relating to smoke detectors). At least one state public-health law appears to require a working bathroom on a plane. Other than that, the law seems to be as quiet as an unoccupied outhouse. "It is completely discretionary," said Tim Smith, a spokesman for Americ= an Airlines. "The captain has the ultimate say about whether to fly or not, when there are a certain number of lavs that are not working. It just depends on the length of the flight, and several other factors." A passenger on an American flight recently experienced a problem with the restrooms on a flight from Dallas to Columbus, Ohio. The regional jet had only one restroom, which started backing up shortly after the plane took off. "For health reasons, we always hydrate thoroughly before and during flights," said Roy Bohlin, a professor at California State University in Fresno. "With about an hour to go on the flight, our 9-year-old son needed to use the restroom and found it out of order." Bohlin pleaded with the flight attendant to open the bathroom, but by the time the crew member understood the urgency of the situation and agreed to unlock the restroom, it was too late. "Of course, our son was humiliated to have urinated in his pants and on the seat and was very uncomfortable for the rest of the trip," he said. American Airlines apologized to the family and sent them a flight vouche= r, agreeing that it probably could have opened the restroom door sooner. But such incidents suggest that there may be a bigger question that the rules need to address. Should a plane be required to have a certain number of working restrooms -- and what happens when the restrooms do not work? Should the aircraft divert to the nearest airport? Maybe that kind of decision is too important to be left to pilots. After all, it is their job to fly the plane, not decide who gets to use the bathroom. At least that is the contention of David Fink, one of the passengers on the United flight from Los Angeles to Sydney. Fink, a corporate strategy consultant from Washington, remembers that the pilot announced that instead of diverting the plane to Fiji to fix the toilets, they would remain on course. "He asked us to stop drinking and to not flush the toilets unless we absolutely had to," he said. (Urbanski of United confirmed that the pilot asked passengers to stop flushing, but says flight attendants continued to serve drinks.) Although Fink and the other passengers landed safely in Australia, he wonders about the health risks of operating a long flight with so few working bathrooms. A functioning toilet is such a basic necessity that the law appears to take it for granted. Perhaps it should not. -------------------------------= --------------------------------------- Copyright 2005 SF Chronicle