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Don’t Touch That! The Dirtiest Parts of the Airplane Cabin, Revealed
03.11.2023 - 17:09 / afar.com
With the busy holiday travel season nearly here, many of us will be taking to the skies to visit friends and family and embrace warm-weather and wintry getaways. In between stressing about high ticket prices and potential flight delays and cancellations, travelers may also be thinking about the grimiest areas on an airplane—and how not to get sick while flying.
Recent reporting from the Washington Post revealing the dirtiest areas on an airplane based on a germ-detection swab test wasn’t terribly surprising, but it’s still somewhat unsettling.
A flight attendant, who preferred not to give her name as she is still employed by a major U.S. airline, admits to AFAR that she has seen her fair share of disgusting things while working, including far too many passengers trudging to the lavatory wearing only socks. If the bathroom floor is wet, it’s safe to assume that it’s urine, she says.
For travelers who want to avoid (and protect themselves from) some of the filthiest places on the plane, here’s what you need to know.
Surprising no one, the airplane lavatory is a minefield of germy surfaces.
Shutterstock
Although the Washington Post experiment showed the bathroom’s sink handle to be the worst culprit of germs, the U.S. flight attendant we spoke to says to beware the door handle, too, because “a lot of people don’t wash their hands.” From her jump seat perch, she says it’s easy to tell by how quickly people exit the lavatory.
For those who are washing their hands after they are done using the restroom, a 2019 Airline Water Study conducted by the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center found that the water airlines use for coffee, tea, and the lavatory sink could be unhealthy—further complicating the issue of in-flight hand washing. Nevertheless, it’s still probably better not to skip this step entirely, according to an AFAR report about the 2019 study. Passengers can simply go one step further and use hand sanitizer after they’ve returned to their seats with washed and dried hands.
The entire seat-back area involves a lot of touching from one planeload of passengers to the next.
Omar Prestwich/Unsplash
On planes with screens built into the back of the seats, passengers can just go ahead and assume these aren’t getting polished by the cleaning crew post-flight. Countless fingers and hands are touching the buttons, leaving the grime and germs to build up. The flight attendant we spoke to says she sees a lot of passengers wipe down the screens, which is a good thing in her mind, because they are “super duper dirty.”
Another place on the plane that’s touched with frequency—and not subject to a thorough scrub (or any scrub!) between flights—is the tray table. The flight attendant says these aren’t, in fact,
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