The Shocking Secret Lurking in the Mysterious Blue Ice Falling from Airplanes Revealed

Ever heard the bizarre urban legend about airplane toilets hurling your, uh, “business” out a secret flap mid-flight? Yeah, that grim tale of flying urine icicles and airborne waste dumping might make you squirm—but here’s the kicker: it’s total hogwash. However, plug your nose yet brace yourself, because there’s a gnarly reality lurking in aircraft lavatories known as ‘blue ice.’ Imagine sewage, mingled with blue disinfectant, freezing into chunks at –60°C, hitching a ride under the plane before plummeting earthward. Sounds like the setup for a horror flick, right? While falling blue ice incidents are rarer than a unicorn sighting, they’ve caused some mess—damaged roofs, a few startled homeowners, and even a shoulder injury or two. But before you start scanning the sky with a bat-shaped umbrella, rest easy: the risk is laughably low compared to the millions of flights soaring overhead annually. Curious as to how this icy menace forms and occasionally crashes the party? LEARN MORE.

The truth behind a popular aviation urban myth known as ‘blue ice’ has been revealed.

Most of us will have heard the weird rumour that every-time you go to the toilet on aeroplane a mysterious flap opens up underneath the fuselage and expels your waste into the atmosphere – just like how older train carriages will dump human waste onto the tracks.

This is, of course, not actually true, although it didn’t stop people making up stories about a person who died after being unwittingly impaled by a flying urine icicle.

While the myth of flying urine and faeces isn’t actually real, there is a similarly grim quirk which occurs in airplane toilets which will certainly make you shudder.

Enter blue ice.

What is ‘blue ice’?

Were you aware of this rare phenomena? (Getty Stock Images)

When a person goes to the toilet at 35,000ft their waste is stored in the aircraft’s septic tank, which is then emptied upon arrival at the airport.

However, every now and again waste can leak from the plane’s septic tank, the sewage – which is mixed with blue disinfectant – escapes to the outside of the aircraft.

With temperatures reaching as low as –60 degrees°C, the runaway waste then freezes to the underside of the aircraft.

When the plane descends to its destination, chunks of the ice then fall off the aircraft to the ground.

Has anyone ever been hit by ‘blue ice’ falling from an aircraft?

Fortunately incidents of falling blue ice are pretty rare, however there have been a number of unlucky souls who’ve either been injured or had property damaged by falling faeces over the years.

In 2024, a house in New Jersey suffered extensive damage after huge chunks of ice believed to be biowaste crashed through the roof.

Blue ice is when small leaks in aircraft septic tanks allow sewage to escape (Getty Stock Images)

According to homeowners Paul and Fabi Gomez, the chunk of ice had crashed through the third floor and damaged the second floor ceiling, however no one was injured in the incident (via NJ.com).

A similar incident occurred in the UK in 2018, when chunks of ice crashed through the roof of a home in Bristol.

There have also been cases of people supposedly being injured by frozen biowaste.

In December 2015, an elderly woman was left with injured an injured shoulder after a 50 kg blue ice chunk came through her ceiling in India.

However, you don’t need to spend the rest of your days sleeping with one eye open or looking up to the sky in fear every time you hear a plane go overhead.

The Civil Aviation Authority classifies the risk of falling ice to be ‘extremely low’, with just 25 cases reported a year, compared to an average of 2.5 million flights which travel over the UK each year (via Heathrow Airport).