The Second Book of General Ignorance (9 page)

A huge block of frozen urine? It has never happened and it never will.

Aeroplanes do not dump the contents of their lavatories overboard. The waste is contained in a holding tank, which is emptied when the aircraft lands. Great care is taken to ensure that this tank is secure. Even if a mad pilot wanted to jettison it, access to the tank is located on the outside of the plane.

On very rare occasions, ice can fall from aeroplanes. Some 3 million flights pass through British airspace every year; in the same period, the Civil Aviation Authority gets just twenty to thirty reports of possible icefalls. The CAA investigates all such complaints by checking the relevant flight paths. Over the past twenty years, they estimate that five people have been hit by small amounts of falling ice.

In July 2009 a lump of ice the size of a football crushed the roof of a car in Loughborough, Leicestershire, but no flights were in the area at the time and the incident has been put down to a freak conglomeration of hailstones.

If ice does fall from a plane, it is either water that has frozen on the wings owing to the high altitude (which melts off as the plane comes into land) or water from the air-conditioning system that has leaked through a faulty seal on to the fuselage. Aircraft toilets often add a blue chemical to the water to deodorise the waste and break down any solids, but any blue ice that falls to the ground is a result of a fault in
the input pipe. It cannot come out of the toilet itself or from the holding tank, which is a fully integrated, sealed unit.

In the USA the Federal Aviation Authority is equally adamant. No American has ever been hit by anything falling from an aircraft lavatory. Phone calls to the FAA complaining about brown droplets coming from the sky always increase during the bird migration season. The FAA also blames so-called ‘blue ice’ on incontinent birds that have been eating blueberries.

Like planes, modern trains in the UK carry chemical retention tanks, but some older rolling stock still offloads its toilet waste straight on to the tracks.

Around Britain’s coastline, there are 20,000 pipes pumping untreated sewage into the sea. These ‘combined sewer overflows’, or CSOs, are intended as a last resort when there is a danger of an urban sewage system flooding. But heavy rainfall in recent summers means that some have been in almost constant use. As a result, in 2009, almost half of Britain’s beaches were ‘not recommended’ for swimming by the Marine Conservation Society’s
Good Beach Guide
.

Resorts that failed to come up to scratch included fashionable destinations such as Rock in Cornwall, Sandgate in Kent and West Sands in St Andrews. It was the worst result for Britain’s beaches for eight years and bad enough for the European Commission to decide to take the UK to court to try to get CSO discharges banned.

They’re very good indeed: especially if you’re in the cheap seats.

In the USA, between 1983 and 2000, there were 568 plane crashes. In 90 per cent of them there were survivors and, out of a total of 53,487 people onboard, 51,207 survived. According to
Popular Mechanics
magazine the safest place to be in the event of a crash is at the back, well behind the wings, where there is a 69 per cent survival rate. Sitting over (or just in front of) the wing reduces your chances of getting out alive to 56 per cent. The worst place to be is right up at the front in first class, where the survival rate falls to 49 per cent. Which is an outrage, considering how much you have to pay to sit there.

According to the world’s leading ‘fire safety engineer’, Professor Ed Galea of the University of Greenwich, the biggest danger is seatbelts. In an emergency, passengers panic and revert to what they are familiar with: they struggle to open them like a seatbelt in a car, resulting in (sometimes fatal) delay. Fire is, of course, a major problem, largely because of smoke inhalation. Your safest bet is to sit on the aisle close to an exit. Before take-off, make a note of how many rows there are between you and the nearest door. That way, even if the cabin is filled with smoke, you’ll still be able to crawl your way out by feel.

Until recently, it was thought impossible for a passenger airliner to make a successful emergency landing on water. The margin for error is so small. To prevent the plane breaking up on impact, the pilot must slow down as much as possible – but without losing lift – and raise the nose of the plane to 12 degrees so that the tail hits the water first. The wings must be perfectly level: if one wing-tip hits the water before the other
the plane will cartwheel and break up. The fuel must be used up or dumped: its weight would cause the plane to sink even if it did land successfully. Then there’s the weather, and sea conditions, either of which could wreck the plane, no matter how calmly the pilot behaves.

Despite such unnerving obstacles, there have been at least half a dozen successful emergency landings by airliners on water, including one off the coast of Sicily in 2005. The most recent and spectacular example occurred in January 2009 when an Airbus A380, US Airways Flight 1549, ditched in the Hudson River in New York. Shortly after take off, the plane hit a flock of geese and Captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger III had to make a forced landing on the water. He did this perfectly, saving the lives of all 155 people on board.

Airline statisticians like to say that you are ten times more likely to be hit by a comet than to die in a plane crash. This is because, once every million years or so, an extraterrestrial body collides with Earth. The next time this happens it will probably wipe out half the world’s population but, as far as we know, the last time anyone was hit by a comet was 12,900 years ago.

It is the case, however, that you are many times more likely to die in the taxi on the way to and from the airport than you are on the flight itself.

It’s not vertigo.

The fear of heights is called acrophobia (from the Greek
akros
, ‘highest’).

Reactions include clinging, crouching, or crawling on all fours as well as the usual symptoms associated with other phobias such as sweating, shaking and palpitations. Acrophobia is unusual among phobias in that it can actually cause what the person is frightened of. A panic attack at height may lead them to lose control and fall.

Vertigo (Latin for ‘whirling’) is a recognised medical condition. It’s a type of dizziness where sufferers feel they are moving when they are in fact stationary. Women are two to three times more likely to suffer from it than men and it gets more common with age. Up to 10 per cent of people experience some form of vertigo in their lives. Vertigo doesn’t necessarily take place high above the ground and it’s not the same thing as acrophobia.

The confusion wasn’t helped by Alfred Hitchcock’s film
Vertigo
(1958). In the movie, an ex-police detective (Jimmy Stewart) suffers from acrophobia as a result of witnessing a fellow officer fall to his death in a rooftop chase. His condition haunts him and the film comes to a climax when he apparently fails to prevent the woman he loves falling from a bell tower. He is unable to climb the stairs due to his crippling fear of heights and an attack of vertigo.

In real life, people with acrophobia may never suffer from vertigo – and vice versa.

A sensible caution towards high places seems to be built into all of us. In 1960, psychologists E. J.Gibson and R. D. Walk created the ‘visual cliff experiment’ in which infants from different species (including human babies) had to cross a transparent glass panel with an apparently sharp drop-off
point beneath it. They found that all the species in the experiment saw and avoided the cliff as soon as they were old enough to manage independent movement – six months for a human or one day in chicks.

While not everyone is frightened of heights, acrophobia appears to be the second most common human phobia of all.

The first is fear of public speaking.