Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/07/passing-plane-pummels-people-w.html
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Keep washing the skies!
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I would have expected this from Air Force One.
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Wait, Blackwater is involved? This quagmire knows no end!
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Back in my childhood, I grew up along a spur line of the Atchinson, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad that used to run along the northern extent of the San Gabriel Valley next to Los Angeles, CA.
We had lots of local freight traffic, but twice daily we were entertained by Amtrak’s Southwest Chief, to and from L.A. and Chicago, via Arizona, New Mexico, and points to the Northeast.
It was a big train, consisting of Amtrak’s double decker Super-Liner rolling stock. Little known fact to people unfamiliar with the trains of the day, their lavatories just emptied onto the tracks. In fact, standing in the loo of the Santa Fe Super Chief rolling stock looking down into the bowl, you would pull the “flush” lever, which would operate a stainless steel flap emptying the bowl’s contents down a chute, and yes, you could see the fast blur of the railroad bed zooming by at the end of the chute.
Because we were working middle class suburban kids, we didn’t have many parks or interesting things to do, so we played a lot on the tracks. There was a plate girder train bridge over a flood control channel and that was endless fun for us. When a long container freight train appeared around the bend off in the distance, we’d step down onto the girders on the inside walls of the bridge which brought us eye-level to train’s wheels – it was to, a 9 year old, an indescribable rush to have a freight train barreling past at 60 MPH just a few feet from your head.
We were educated enough in railroading lore to never do this when the Amtrak went by. In fact there was a song we’d sing to the tune of an antiquated half-a-century-earlier tune, no doubt in part inspired by placards posted in railroad lavatories:
Passengers will please refrain
from flushing toilets while the train
is in the station,
Baby, I love you…
We encourage constipation,
while the train is in the station,
if the brakes can hold it,
so can you!
No doubt modern passenger railroading equipment has switched to holding tanks with emptying stations posted at various intervals along the route. Passenger aircraft have always preferred holding tanks probably because by then humanity had learned of the hazards of poo dispersal from fast moving vehicles.
Aircraft toilets, however, are incredibly complicated affairs. They are powered by the pressure differential between the outside atmosphere and the cabin pressurization which is generated by bleed air from the post compression stage of one or both engines (and run through another complex and interesting piece of equipment called an Air Cycle Machine, aka AC packs). What happens is that sometimes there’s a leaky seal in one of the components, which forces a steady drip of lav waste to exit via the pressure vent. This freezes very quick quickly and forms large frozen accumulation of blue ice on the side of the aircraft which thaws during landing and lands on buildings and people etc.
In the various transportation industries, shit happens.
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Well, shit happens.
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This shit just got real.
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" if the falling frozen feces came from the plane" Ok, so just what the hell else flies around around dropping frozen shit. Damn sure ain’t something the stork delivers.
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You can always count on there being at least one boinger who knows a lot about whatever random shit comes up. (or comes down for that matter…)
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Alternate Universe Biff Tannen?
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The Dutch Intercity trains still dump on the tracks.
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No doubt modern passenger railroading equipment has switched to holding tanks with emptying stations posted at various intervals along the route.
You have not been to Italy and taken the train recently have you 
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Heh. Yes, there is a reason there are signs that say “Do not use the lavatory while the train is in a station” 
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We’ve known this for a while:
Yeah, sometimes I’m waiting for the train and there’s tp on the tracks
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Talk about your Icy BMs.
(With thanks to Spider Robinson, in one of whose books I read this pun a donkey’s years ago.)
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No, their shit doesn’t get dropped from the plane, it gets put in the cabinet.
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