I was perusing an article in South Florida’s Sun-Sentinel the other day, about how airlines are coping with the soaring cost of fuel. Almost as an aside, the paper mentioned that Spirit Airlines removed one of the 3-lavatories from its Airbus A319 jets, as a cost cutting measure! (Less weight = less fuel usage). That got me to thinking: Spirit sure hasn’t been lacking for weird publicity this past year, and…exactly how many restrooms are planes supposed to have? Keep reading to see some of the bizarre stuff I came up with.

First, Spirit’s publicity problems (though you know what they say, there’s no such thing as “bad” publicity, especially if they spell your name right):

• In December, Spirit ran a creepy ad campaign featuring a vulgar acronym
• In August, Spirit’s CEO blasted a passenger via email, saying, “Let him tell the world how bad we are.” The passenger, who got the email by mistake, promptly did

Anyway, a very nice Spirit spokeswoman told us that the airline has indeed removed one of 3-lavatories on its A319s, planes that hold 144 passengers.

I don’t know about you, but 2-restrooms for almost 150-people doesn’t sound like very much to me. So I decided to go digging and find out how many lavatories are required per passenger.

Guess what? As best as I can tell, there ISN’T any requirement.

Okay, I did find this on Wikipedia:

“The normally accepted minimum ratio of ‘lavs’ to passengers is approximately 1 lavatory for every 50 passengers.” (Wikipedia)

But this article lists no sources, no citations, and I could find nothing that backed it up. So I kept looking.

On the Airliners.net site (a site for aviation professionals and passengers), I found some interesting reader comments, including this one:

“The minimum number of lavatories is ZERO. The pilot in command makes the decision.” (Airliners.net)

Well, that’s crazy, I thought. And of course I had no way to verify it. Then I went to Chris Elliott’s site (probably should have started there) and it seems he did some digging on this as well, and had about as much luck as I did, except, he also had a comment from an American Airlines spokesman, which made me re-evaluate the anonymous comment above. This is from Chris’ “Potty Time” post:

“It is completely discretionary,” said Tim Smith, a spokesman for American Airlines. “The captain has the ultimate say about whether to fly or not, when there are a certain number of lavs that are not working. It just depends on the length of the flight, and several other factors.”

So, there you have it. I have contacted the FAA, and will let you know what, if anything they have to say about the number of aircraft lavatories. Goodness, the wild goose chases I go on, just from reading a “throwaway” line in a newspaper article.

Oh, but one last thing: I also found a satirical post on the amusing parody website, Travel Fox which described some imaginary airline removing half its lavatories. It was supposed to be a joke. Not anymore, Fox…not anymore.