A dirty aviation story: It's raining poo from the sky!

Popular belief has it that this may have been caused by airplanes which accidentally or deliberately dumped their load of poo during a flight, a move Canadian Aviation Regulations deems punishable. Airlines call this dump 'blue ice' after the color of the toilet disinfectant used on flights.

Canada's aviation authority has denied any such possibility. Image source: Pixabay

Imagine you're casually driving with sunroof of your car down, and suddenly a foul-smelling substance falls on you, literally, from the sky! Yes, you read that right! This is exactly what has reportedly happened with Susan Allen, a woman from Kelowna, British Columbia who caught conjunctivitis after the strange incident in late May. Further, many more people complained of such incidents.

Popular belief has it that this may have been caused by airplanes which accidentally or deliberately dumped their load of poo during a flight, a move Canadian Aviation Regulations deems punishable. Airlines call this dump 'blue ice' after the color of the toilet disinfectant used on flights.

However, Canada's aviation authority has denied any such possibility.

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“The department’s review has concluded that these incidents do not meet the description of blue ice and are therefore not aviation-related,” said an unnamed spokesperson to Vice website.

Environmental scientists, meanwhile, named the phenomenon 'poopsicle'. This happens when a leaking airplane lavatory ices over and then slowly melts as the plane touches down.

"The poop had likely stemmed from a leak on the plane that slowly continued to freeze and grow as the plane reached higher, colder altitudes," according to environmental sciences professor Robert Young, PhD and his colleague Bernie Bauer, PhD.

“If it started as being kind of a poopsicle on the bottom of a plane, then it could easily thaw and become liquid as it came down,” he revealed to Inverse website.

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Interestingly, India also witnessed such an incident earlier in the year. According to a BBC report, a 10-12kg chunk of ice fell on Fazilpur Badli village with a big thud, startling residents on Saturday.

Villagers, in fact, thought it was an 'extra-terrestrial' object and sneaked a few pieces to store in refrigerators at home!

A senior official of the Indian Meteorological Department, after examining a small sample, said the projectile was "definitely not a meteorological phenomenon", but could be airline waste.

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