If you’ve ever found yourself on an early flight, or one landing back in Australia upwards of 12 hours after your plane left and it’s now 6 am and you want, nay need, a coffee, you’re not alone. But there’s a rumour circulating that you should wait until you get to the airport before you scull a brew; that airline coffee is, to put it kindly, rank.
The rumour was brought to our attention while listening to the latest episode of the Search Engine by PJ Vogt podcast. Vogt, in an accompanying blog, details the claim Antoni Porowski of Queer Eye fame talks about. But on this podcast episode, Porowski and Vogt discuss the claim, saying it really started with the notion that you should never wash your hands in the bathroom of an aeroplane.
“My dad’s an ER physician and he told me he would get cases of people who would get pink eye or some kind of stye infection … and he would learn that a lot of these people would take flights, so I started paying attention, then I noticed that when pilots use the bathroom, they bring in a bottle of water with them,” Porowski said, confirming that it was just twice (2 times) he saw pilots do that.
Then, Porowski said he asked a flight attendant about the coffee situation.
“I don’t care how much I need coffee, I would never drink that,” he quoted the flight attendant as saying.
The same water, he said, is used to wash your hands AND make the tea/coffee.
So what’s the actual issue here? Well, apparently, it all comes from the same tank. And, apparently, they only have to wash the tank once or twice a year.
Yikes.
Vogt brought in Wall Street Journal journalist Nancy Keates who back in 2002 wrote an expose on the whole darn thing. Preparing that piece, Keates and her team took 14 flights (including one to Sydney) and tested the water on each.
Asked what she found when testing the water, Keates responded: “Horrible things.”
In preparation of the podcast, Vogt said he asked many people, including friends, strangers, and the most popular airlines in the U.S. about their water/coffee drinking habits in the sky. The people said “ew no” and the airlines said nothing. Naturally, we asked Qantas.
Qantas was kind enough to suggest I reach out to U.S. airlines instead, but that wasn’t exactly the point of an Australian journalist looking into these claims from Australia, trying to assess if it’s the same with Australian carriers.
Unfortunately, we at Gizmodo Australia are far too under-resourced to do our own 14-flight investigation, so do what you will with the information Keates and Vogt shared with the world. All I know is next time I get on a plane I won’t be drinking a coffee, no matter how much I need one.