Yes, mess up the toilet for a laugh...and your fellow passengers get to cross their legs for several hours. Wonder if this is illegal? I have a feeling they'll find out.

Wait, he's not white. What's he doing on an airplane?

This experiment calls for replication!

Also, Spider Robinson knows his puns.

there must be a way to apply that energy to a sudden release... a bladder-implosion bomb?

Wow, I should really watch out when flushing if I'm wearing a tie!

Hmm. I wonder if Spider still shows up at all the local sci-fi cons? He's on my list of authors that I'd like to have a nice chat with, along with Gibson, who also lives around here somewhere.

Wow, that's an irritating voice. It's as if Gilbert Godfried and Willy Mays had a love child.

More importantly, why doesn't my home toilet do this?

(Seriously, even new houses are built with .5" pipes for tank-flush toilets rather than 1" pipes for tankless "industrial" toilets. Do people enjoy plunging or something? We have the technology.)

p.s. If you need to retrofit, there's the Sloan Flushmate.

This brings back a particularly vivid memory from when I was 8 and happened to be on one of the last Pan Am flights. The flight attendants proceeded to string toilet paper all throughout the cabin, over the seats and even held aloft in people's hands and then flushed the toilet, causing the entire roll of TP to zip by at breakneck speed. For an eight year old it was probably one of the most awesome things I ever saw, although ever since then I made a point of standing up and away from airplane toilets before flushing for fear of my intestines being sucked out of me.
Of course I also didn't want my Dad to pick Scotland as a place to live for fear of the Loch Ness monster coming up through our toilet, so it's not like it was the ONLY irrational fear I had regarding the commode...

Deamon - At the risk of not teaching you to use google, here is Spider's con schedule.

Let me be the first commenter to say that this post really sucks.

I remember years ago being on an almost empty San Francisco to Philadelphia night flight, and spending a lot of time standing in the galley talking to a very pretty and very unbusy flight attendant. At one point she took my arm and, greatly raising my hopes, guided me into the toilet. My dreams were not fulfilled, however, because once inside, she pulled off several yards of toilet paper, rolled one end into a ball and dropped it into the toilet, and draped the rest around the room. She then hit the flush, and wizz, the whole length snaked its way into the bowl and disappeared.

Apparently she'd just come off training for the new plane we were in (I forget the model), and her instructor had demonstrated this trick by running a whole roll of tp over the seat backs up and down the cabin.

Not quite what I expected or hoped for, but certainly a memorable flight.

TGT

Can't be real. The friction of the unrolled toilet tissue against the carpeting would be far more than enough opposing force to tear the tissue.

Agree. That paper is so thin to start with, you are always running the risk of chocolate finger when you use that stuff. Plus how did he get on the plane for this? What airline is going to allow this demonstration?

suppose we try and flush a cro-bar, or something that'd jam the mechanism open - how long would it take to depressurize the cabin?

Yeah, Anonymous @ 1. I'm sure he snuck onto an empty airplane, turned on the lights and spent an hour filming while nobody noticed.

you are always running the risk of chocolate finger when you use that stuff.

I prefer the terms 'journey to the center of the earth' or 'a trip to the moon on gossamer wings'.

Does this still work if the plane is on a giant treadmill, instead of flying?

the toilet paper still takes off

that's what i would have done to the mother f***ing snakes on the plane

Nice. Now we've got to invent a new carbon-footprint trade-cap category.

There's the (apocryphal) story of the plane that landed, and when they popped the bathroom to clean found an obese dead woman on the john. Story goes that she flushed while seated and having created a flesh seal...

.... well, use the imagination.

They have the same kind of toilets on the Carnival Cruise Ships, you can hold a roll of toilet paper in two fingers and it spins the whole thing away.

Cut scenes make me wonder if editing magic is being used here. Maybe not but they easily could have shown an uninterrupted shot of the rim.

Note this appears to be a viral marketing thing for AirTran.

This is what brought down Air France 447.

just loved this video. This guy is really funny.

http://www.markonairtran.com/Public/Main.aspx

Consumer stupidity / marketing op of AirTran.

The guy in the video is Mark Malkoff. This is also the same dude who visited every Starbucks in Manhattan in 24 hours and lived in the Paramus NJ Ikea for a week. http://www.markmalkoff.com/go/

I, for one, liked the video.

@#15: The low air pressure that sucks things into the toilet does not come from the outside air. Notice that airplane toilets still work on the ground, where there is no pressure difference between the outside and the inside. There is a vacuum pump that keeps a lower pressure in the pipes that take away the excrement for storage. (No, it is not dumped out). Other vehicles like boats also have vacuum toilets. If they were perfectly steady, they'd have toilets like bus toilets where the excrement just falls into a hole, but the motion of airplanes and boats makes this a little risky so they add the vacuum.

@#13 and 14: I disagree. Remember that the friction force has to do with the coefficient of friction (between toilet paper and airliner carpet, in this case) and the normal force (the weight of the toilet paper roll). According to this model, if you dragged a rolled-up roll of toilet paper on the carpet (and didn't allow it to roll, such as by unrolling some toilet paper and then gluing the place where the rolled-out paper met the roll (so it wouldn't un-roll any further), and pulling the rolled-out paper), the friction force (and thus the tension on the paper you're pulling) would be the same as if you fully unrolled the roll (as shown on the video): weight of toilet paper roll, times coefficient of friction. Sure, unrolling the roll drastically increases the surface area, but it drastically reduces the friction force per unit area since the weight of each ply of toilet paper is next to nothing. So the friction of all the plies (which are next to nothing) all add up to the same friction as if you were pulling a rolled-up roll. Right?

I was flying Southwest about 4 years ago and saw the exact same trick. It was a red-eye, and most people were asleep. This flight attendant comes down the isle unrolling the toilet paper and laughing and motioning everyone to watch. One finished unrolling it, the other waited, and with much showmanship flushed. Sure enough worked exactly as the video. Pretty funny, especially at 2am in the morning. Made me love flying Southwest for years after that.