Many fears and sometimes even myths exist around the cleanliness of different parts of the airplane.
While many fear the tight bathroom space at the back of the plane, one swab test run by a reporter on a flight from Orlando to Cancun showed that the handle used to bring down the tray table in front of one’s seat is barely any cleaner due to how frequently it’s touched while also being easy to miss by a worker in a rush to clean the plane quickly.
Over the weekend of Dec. 2 and 3, a flight attendant and TikTok user named Kevin drew attention to a Reddit post asking flight attendants to share some “dirty little secrets” from the industry.
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Why this pilot says ‘don’t drink the coffee on board’
While some of the most upvoted comments were about difficult passengers or customs authorities in authoritarian countries, one comment further down the thread came from someone identifying himself as a pilot.
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“Not a flight attendant, but pilot: don’t drink coffee on board,” the Redditor under the @DCS_Sport username wrote. “The water tanks on airplanes are rarely, if ever cleaned, and they use this water to make coffee on board. I don’t want to think about mold and bacteria growing in those tanks.”
The flight attendant on TikTok confirmed that he would not recommend drinking the coffee on the plane but instead arrive at the airport early enough to buy one at the terminal — even if, according to him, the cleanliness of the pot should not be one’s primary concern.
‘You kind of have to get a little close to the toilet…’
“For me, it’s always been the way the flight attendants have to clean out coffee pots,” Kevin says in the video. “For whatever reason, we’re not supposed to empty coffee pots in drains, we’re supposed to dump it down the toilet. In order to not make a huge mess everywhere, you kind of have to get a little close to the toilet and I imagine that there’s some kind of backsplash of particles or bacteria or whatever that goes directly back into the coffee pot which gets put back into the coffee maker.”
While Kevin’s description of how he cleans out coffee pots has not been confirmed by other flight attendants, the graphic description of getting close to the toilet was enough to shock a larger number of his followers and, likely, put them off airplane coffee for good.
“Every day of my OCD is justified,” wrote one commenter named Jennell.
“Coffee, tea, it’s a no for me,” wrote another. “Ginger ale me up.”
While there have been no news stories of this practice causing a massive infection to anyone as of yet, Kevin recommended those who are grossed out to steer clear of in-air coffee unless they double-check that the plane has a Nespresso machine or other such coffee maker (this can often be found in first class.)
“It always kills because the people that I found to complain about this would go into the bathroom without their shoes on and they probably don’t own floss,” he said.
