DUBAI – A Cathay Pacific flight carrying 278 passengers from Riyadh to Hong Kong was forced to make an unscheduled landing after crew discovered none of the lavatories worked, the latest toilet trouble to hit the airline.

The Nov. 17 flight was forced divert to Mumbai when crew realised none of the 10 toilets were functional shortly after takeoff, caused an 18-hour delay on what should have been an eight-hour flight.

Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific said on Wednesday it has endured a spate of mysterious toilet blockages on its Airbus fleet, with lavatories on its Airbus A330 and A340 planes blocked in three separate incidents over the past 11 days.

The two other flights affected by blocked toilets were from Rome to Hong Kong on Nov. 9 and Dubai to Hong Kong on Nov. 19.

In both cases, the number of passengers had to be restricted to fewer than 240 when it was discovered before take-off that only toilets on one side of the plane were functioning.

The exact cause of the toilet blockages remained unclear, but an airline spokeswoman said that passengers might be partly to blame.

“You would be amazed at what we find in the pipes when we clean the system – not just face towels but medicine bottles, socks, items of clothing and even children’s stuffed toys,” she said.

The airline said it has consulted Airbus about the problem and its engineers are now fitting new pipes and carrying out deep-cleaning treatment on toilets.

Aircraft toilets use high-speed pipes that carry waste at up to 110 km per hour into a holding tank which is emptied between flights.

Two vacuum systems operate separately on each side of the plane, meaning that a blockage usually affects all toilets on one side of the aircraft.

Cathay’s internal guidelines say the minimum toilet-to-passenger ratio in economy class should be one to 80.

Source: business.maktoob.com