A frozen airplane poo baffled everyone who saw it after it leaked from the sky down onto a village in India.
The 10-12kg chunk of brown ice fell from the plane on to Fazilpur Badli village with a huge thud on Saturday, January 20.
As you would when a load of strangely coloured and smelling ice falls straight from the sky, many villagers thought it was an extra-terrestrial object.
Planes store human waste in special tanks which are emptied once the plane has landed.
International aviation authorities do however acknowledge lavatory leaks can occur while the plane is in flight.
Senior Gurgaon official, Vivek Kalia, told the BBC:
It was a very heavy icy ball of ice which dropped from the skies early on Saturday morning.
There was big thud and people of the village came running out of their homes to find out what had happened.
Some villagers thought it was an extra-terrestrial object. Others thought it was some celestial rock and I’ve heard that they took samples home.
Kalia said after the projectile had been sent for chemical analysis, they ‘suspect strongly’ it’s frozen plane poo.
A senior official of the Indian Meteorological Department, who examined a small sample, said the projectile was ‘definitely not a meteorological phenomenon’.
It seems this is not a one-off issue in India – back in December 2016, a court in India ruled airlines would be fined if their planes released human waste from their toilets while in the air.
Apart from the hygiene issues, a massive chunk of ice falling at speed from a plane has the potential to cause serious injury.
In January 2016, a woman in central Madhya Pradesh state suffered a severe shoulder injury when she was hit by a football sized chunk of ice which fell from the air and crashed into the roof of her house.
The ‘poo ice’ is often referred to as ‘blue ice’ because of the chemicals used to reduce odour and break down the disposal.
It turns out about 25 falls of ‘blue ice’ are reported every year from the 2.5 million flights over the UK.
The people who took samples of it home must be pretty gutted.
They say don’t eat yellow snow. Well now, don’t touch blue ice and definitely don’t put it in your freezer!
