Wait, should I not be drinking airplane coffee? 53:16

Hi, this is Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. Each week, I try to answer a question I have about the world. No question too big, no question too small. This week, is it true you should never, under any circumstances, drink the coffee on airplanes? Do I sound too much like a TV news anchor if I say the answer may surprise you? Anyway, we'll get into it after these ads. Search Engine is brought to you by Ford.

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In March, I went to visit a friend at his apartment in New York, a former roommate who actually over the years has had a lot of success on TV. His name's Anthony, as in Anthony Porowski. You may have seen him on the Netflix show Queer Eye. He's also the author of two best-selling cookbooks and honestly, just a great host.

Cole brew, nitro, or espresso, like latte situation? Anthony and I have actually been friends for a long time. Way before he had a TV show, way before I had a podcast. We go back, this feels crazy to say, almost 20 years. How do we know each other? We know each other... Well, originally we took acting classes together in Montreal when you studied at McGill and I studied at Concordia. And then when I moved to New York and I needed an apartment because I moved here for school...

You had a place in Clinton Hill with a roommate and you had a spare bedroom in a condo and I moved in with you sight unseen. We had some good years. We did have some good years. Okay, so we're not here to talk about good years. We were flying together and you said something...

that haunted me more than I expected it to. Do you remember this? Yes, I remember exactly. You said under no circumstances should someone drink the coffee on an airplane or the water provided on an airplane. Yes. Okay. So it started out. You should never wash your hands in the bathroom of an airplane. I haven't been doing that anyway. Oh, great. Well,

We'll take that on at a later time. But so my father told me, my dad's an ER physician, and he told me that he would get cases of people who would get like pink eye or some kind of an eye infection or a stye infection. And he loves to like research and like get down to like the root cause of things. And he would learn that a lot of these people would take flights.

So I started paying attention and then I noticed that when pilots use the bathroom, they bring in a bottle of water with them or like a thermosy situation. You independently noticed that? Yes, I noticed that myself on Delta flights in particular.

Okay, so you notice pilots walking into the bathroom holding bottles of water. I notice it twice. Still. That's still like enough to make a valid assumption, right? So it started out that way. And your assumption is the reason they're bringing the bottle of water, it's not because they want to like rehydrate while they pee or whatever. It's that they're washing their hands with the bottle of water. Correct. Okay.

And then I was on a really early morning flight one day and there was a sassy flight attendant and she just seemed like she didn't give two shits. And she asked if we wanted like coffee or tea or anything. And then I was like, okay, I need you to be honest with me. How do you feel about the water? Like I really want coffee, but how do you feel about the coffee on a plane? And then she looked at me and she said something along the lines of, I don't care how much I need coffee. I would never drink that.

And then I kind of like started asking around and then I learned that the same water is used to create the coffee and the tea that is used to wash your hands in the bathroom.

And so is the problem, what is the theory that just like they're not cleaning the container that the water's in? I mean, it's not that they're serving people hand wash, backwash, coffee. Like that's not the problem. No, no, no, no, no, no. But it all comes from the same tank. And herein lies the issue. And I have no proof of this. This is only like rumors that I've heard, but I'm running with it. Apparently they only have to legally wash the tank once or twice a year.

That's disgusting. So when you're on a plane and you're watching, like people just like sip their coffee or whatever, are you just like, oh, I judge it and I worry for their safety. And then I'm just so excited because I always bring two Yetis with me. I bring one. I go to a Starbucks and I order ahead so that I have plenty amount of coffee because I love drinking coffee. And then the second one, I fill up with water after I pass TSA so that I'm able to be hydrated and I don't have to ask for a million little plastic water bottles.

One of the benefits of our friendship is like, you're so thoughtful about existing in the world. And I kind of drag my body around like it's like a meat balloon that got attached to my leg while I'm like looking at my phone. And so I'd be like, I benefit from hanging out with you because you're like, hey, there's like a nicer way to exist if you'd like to. But I would never...

I would never remember to bring like two Yetis to the airport. That wouldn't happen for me. I would buy it. Here's what will happen. We'll have this conversation. I'll buy a Yeti on the internet because it's cool. And then I'll like procrastinate opening the package when it comes to my house. And then I'll open it and then I'll lose it three days later. Lucky for you, you're at my apartment right now. So when you leave, you're going to leave with two new Yetis. Oh.

And one of them has a little spout for hot beverages, so it doesn't like pour onto your mouth. And the other one is great for water where it has a bigger mouth. I don't deserve to have friends. So just to explain this moment a little bit, Anthony, one part of his personality is just that he recommends a lot of products. Like professionally, yes, he has deals with brands. But I mean, even before that was his job.

well before he was famous. He's just always been a person who's very evangelical about recommending things he likes, whether or not anyone's paying him to do that. If he finds a good sunscreen, I'll hear about it. A good pierogi place, a new recipe, certain kinds of deodorant. And his life is a never-ending quest to make things just a little bit better. And that was maybe part of what was under this question. Airline travel, famously immune to improvement. He wanted to know, when it came at least to the disgusting water...

A, was this rumor true? But B, if it was true, were some airlines doing better than others? It would be nice to know, do different airlines have different laws for how often they have to clean the tank? And where does the water come from? Like the major ones, American, Delta, United. But Delta is my favorite airline. So I'd be very curious to see if there's any difference.

It had not occurred to me, but it seemed natural to Anthony, that you might pay attention to how well an airline took care of the noticeable details as a sort of proxy for understanding how well they did everything else. Well, I'm not going to name the airline, but you remember the airline that we flew to Seattle? That wasn't a great one. There were no TVs there.

The chairs were like, it was an old plane because I'm still terrified of flying. You're still terrified of flying? Absolutely. I have started looking at the type of airplane and seeing the way the seating is set up. I like to have a space between me and the window because I feel like if a window cracks open, it has happened. The whole body gets sucked out. All the bones crush.

then I feel like I'm safer in the middle and I feel more like coddled in a good way. But anyway, wait, hold on. No, no, no, no, no, no. But anyway, that's crazy. I was like reading something online the other day where somebody was like, I don't understand why it was some like economist nerd. And they were like, I don't get why they don't charge less for middle seats since no one would ever want a middle seat. You are the target market for a middle seat just in case the window cracks open. So the person next to you gets sucked out of the window before you. Correct. But my point is I'm coming back.

There must be some kind of a thing like the way you can see the seating chart based on the year of the plane. So you can see what the seating layout is like. I wonder if you could also see where like the water tanks are to see if like the one in the bathroom is separate from the one that's being used for like the coffee and the tea. And there must be like guidelines and regulations available. I feel like everything is available on the internet. I have three flights coming up in the next week and I will ask every single flight attendant

And anybody I can, including the person at like the check-in window, if they know this information, because I want to get to the bottom of it too. After the break, I find some answers on TikTok and academia and via an unusual kind of detective. Search Engine is brought to you by Greenlight.

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Welcome back to the show. You know when you're in school and you raise your hand and ask something, and before the teacher answers, they hit you with a real quick, good question?

That compliment always made me feel good. It also always confused me. Like, what's a good question? Does it mean your question itself is smart? Like, your confusion is the intelligent kind? How could a question actually be good? I used to not know, but I can now point to at least one good question in the world. Do you drink coffee on airplanes is an excellent question.

Not because it communicates something about you, its asker, but because it does something powerful and immediate in the brain of the person you ask it to. It works on them, almost like a human computer virus. Even to someone who's never been asked it, do you drink coffee on airplanes is just so obviously loaded. When you ask it, and genuinely, in a quiet moment, in a car ride, I suggest you try asking it, it gets results. Some recipients are thrown immediately into a state of panic.

Those people never actually answer you. Instead, they start peppering you with questions. Should I not be drinking airline coffee? Do you? When they boil the water, does that at least get rid of the germs? But there's another response you can get. Some people will answer with the confidence of a person acing a test. Airline coffee. Of course I don't drink airline coffee. I would never. These people are immune to your invitation to fear because they already have it.

They'll tell you, "I've heard the tanks are never cleaned. I've heard the flight attendants don't drink it." They'll tell you, "They don't actually boil the water long enough or hot enough to kill any bacteria." The two of you will start to finish each other's sentences, and all of a sudden, you're actually in something together. I always thought of paranoia as a lonely disease, but it's only lonely if you're the only one infected with it. This is a long way of telling you that I spent a delirious few months asking a lot of people if they drink coffee on airplanes.

enjoying the question's quiet power, marinating deeply in the paranoia it can summon. Of course, we also reached out to major airlines to ask them directly about their water quality. Delta, United, American, JetBlue. None responded, except for United, which directed our question to a trade association, which said, quote, the top priority of the airline industry is the safety of all passengers and crew members. They also said that the airlines routinely check their water systems. And yet...

the rumors persisted. On TikTok, there's a minor genre of video where chirpy flight attendants invoke some kind of conspiracy in the same breezy tone they use while telling you where the exit rows are located.

Secrets about pilots and flight attendants that I bet you didn't know about, part two. Number one, you might want to think about ordering something other than coffee or tea. The thing about the coffee and the tea is that the pipes serving it are rarely cleaned. And they are disgusting. So talk to a flight attendant. We rarely, rarely drink the coffee or tea. I started asking flight attendants on flights I was on. Here's a question. Do you drink the coffee on these flights? No.

My friends and coworkers, they also started asking flight attendants. She responded in a tone that suggested this was not the first time she'd been asked the question.

The same story over and over, and the same warning over and over. They did say that the tap water in the washroom is particularly dangerous to drink because, I quote, fecal and urine particles can get into the tap system.

I was asking so many people the question that eventually it occurred to me to wonder, who had the question before me, before Antony? This conspiracy theory that maybe wasn't a conspiracy theory, where had it come from? Hi, Nancy. Hi. How are you doing? I'm okay, thanks. You're going to have to forgive me. I just stuffed a handful of Skittles into my mouth.

This person who I was talking to with a face full of office candy, she'd beaten me to this airline coffee story narrowly by a mere two decades. My name's Nancy Keats. I'm a reporter with The Wall Street Journal. I've been at The Journal since 1994. And back then I was working in New York at the World Financial Center. And my editor was a guy named Jonathan Dahl. And he loved to do stories where we tested things. Oh, interesting. Interesting.

Before finding herself in the same mystery we're in about the quality of airline coffee, Nancy tested all sorts of things with the Wall Street Journal. Honestly, it sounded like kind of a dream job.

We would travel all over and test different things. Like I tested room service at hotels. I went around the country trying to find the smallest hotel rooms with a tape measure. So it was really fun stories like that. And just to your editor who'd like to test things, I think I get it, but like what was that? Is it just that every time you test something, it's like a little mystery and for the readers, it's fun to like...

here are the results of reporter-conducted experiments? I think it was partly that, and it was also partly just an interesting way to approach it. For example, we tested the number of steps it took to get from a hotel room to the conference center. So it was actually valuable information for people if they wanted to book a conference at a place where the hotel rooms were close to the conference center. And how did you guys decide what to test?

We just came up with things like when I did, you know, best beaches. So that's a pretty obvious one. But then I went and tested the water quality at each of the beaches and the sand quality. So it's sort of what time of year it was and what issues were coming up. Yeah. Yeah. And in this case, it was because a colleague of mine saw a posting on a forum called Flyer Talk, which is a travel website.

Nancy's airplane water test was inspired by this message board post she read in 2002. I'm going to tell you about the content of this post on the Flyer Talk message board in a moment. But before I do, I want you to picture a 2002-era airplane. Or actually, just the water that flowed through it.

This water was untested by the EPA. It was untested by the FDA. This water existed like indoor cigarettes or Coca-Cola with cocaine in it in an unregulated past where American companies could more easily poison American consumers without interference from any pesky scientists or muckrakers. This water was a mystery, and yet it flowed so freely.

It wasn't just pouring out of the sinks uninterrupted by any new signs telling you not to gorge yourself on it. It also came out of an actual water fountain, too. I had deleted this water fountain from my memory, but it existed. On many flights, often near the bathroom, a water fountain offering untested mystery water to any passenger bold enough to drink it. But this state of unregulated, questionable affairs was about to be disrupted.

The federal government itself was going to be moved to action because a Wall Street Journal reporter was going to read a posting on a message board called Flyer Talk, which bills itself as an internet forum for the discussion of frequent flyer miles programs. And what was the story? What was what was being said on Flyer Talk? So it was a posting by the mother of a 13 year old from California. And his name is Zachary Bjornsson Hooper.

And they had taken a trip to Australia and he was thinking on the plane about the water that he was drinking and he was thinking how would you regulate it in different countries, you know, depending on where the water was being sourced. And he felt like he just had this sense that it wasn't clean and so he decided to test it. And he sort of tested it and went to his hotel room and then found the results that it was contaminated.

Zachary Bjornsson Hooper, the homeschooled 13-year-old, stumbled on this question, is it safe to drink the coffee on an airplane through a different route than me? 13-year-olds, I've noticed, have a natural ability to ask perfect questions. In this case, he said at the time that the question formed in his brain because he was thinking about how his family had a sailboat. And his parents had told him he wasn't supposed to drink the water on the sailboat because it was unclean. So he wondered, why then would the water on the plane be clean?

Zachary was homeschooled. He was also taking some science classes at the local school district. So he was able to put together a rudimentary experiment. Nine water samples from different flights tested in nine Petri dishes. In seven of the samples, pretty nasty bacteria. Fecal coliform, E. coli, salmonella. To Zachary, that seemed remarkable. His mom was proud. So the two of them wrote up their results and posted them on flyertalk.com, which is where the Wall Street Journal found it.

So we saw that posting on Flyer Talk. We thought that was interesting and maybe we should test it ourselves. And before you had done this, did you have an expectation of like, had you ever thought about the quality of airline water?

Yes, all the time because I travel all the time. And I'm the kind of person who always brings bottled water, you know, no matter what. And then, you know, planes used to have these kind of water fountain-like things over by the bathrooms. And I used to always think, you know, where is that water coming from? And I also wondered about the coffee because...

Does it heat up enough to kill the bacteria? I don't know. Maybe it's also because I traveled all the time and got sick all the time. And so that's another issue. You kind of want to try to figure it out. Is it the air? Is it the water? Is it other people? Right. Right. So you have the question. You have an editor who is encouraging you to test stuff. You have...

this kid who's posting on Flyer Talk who's like, I think something's afoot. Had you talked to flight attendants or pilots? Because I've been doing that lately now when I fly. If I can get a flight attendant in a sort of like private-ish moment, I've asked them about the water. Were you doing that? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, you've got two different types. You've got people who lie to you and people who don't. Yeah.

And what did the liar say? Everything's fine. It's all bottled, you know, whatever. So Nancy, armed with her own deep suspicions and some makeshift research results posted by a 13-year-old kid on a frequent flyer forum, she gets together with her editor and they come up with a game plan. Basically just a more expanded version of Zachary's test with a little bit more scientific lab power behind it. We booked 14 different flights and we picked a variety of different people

destinations, everywhere from Atlanta to Sydney, Australia. Mixed it up, flying all different airlines, you know, domestic, short haul, international, long haul, to see if the carrier or the distance might have an impact. And on those flights, we tested the water in the bathroom and then the water that came out of that water fountain that I was talking about.

And so what did testing look like? How did you test that? So you board the plane, you're carrying like a kind of a thing you would bring to a picnic, like a cooler type thing. And in it, I had the sample cups from the lab and gloves. And so the flight would take off and I would take one of the sample cups back to the bathroom, fill it up.

with my gloves on, put it into the cooler, and then close it, and then do the same with the water fountain. And then once I got to the airport, I would immediately send it off to the lab for testing. We picked a lab in Indiana, and we followed the sort of regulations of the EPA. So we used gloves, we carried vials provided by the lab. You know, we ran the water for a certain period of time. You just want to avoid contamination. And then once we got the samples, we put them in, you know,

temperature-controlled packages and sent them off to the lab. So we tried to follow it as carefully as we could. And so what did you find when you tested the water? Horrible things. The things Nancy and her co-reporter Jane Costello found in the drinking water of airlines, the water that you are forced to contend with because you are stuck in a tube in the sky with no freedom and few choices, the things in that water were legitimately quite horrible.

The journal's tests found Pasturella pneumotropica, a bacteria mainly carried by rats. They found Salmonella. They found a bacterium called Pseudomonas, which can cause infections in the blood and lungs. And they found eggs. You know, in one sample, we found like tiny insect eggs. Tiny insect eggs? Yeah, we interviewed the...

director of the lab who tested our samples, and he was just completely shocked and appalled by what we found. I don't usually feel physical disgust at things, and tiny insects, I will admit, turned my stomach. Yeah. I think they, after a few days, hatched into maggots. Oh! And the director said, his quote in our story was, "'I've never seen it in all the 26 years I've been testing water.'"

The same, I have to say, very quotable lab director had another line I particularly liked. He said one of the water samples had the same amount of bacteria you'd expect to find in a sample of tainted raw hamburger. Again, this is 2002, before the government was taking notice.

Nancy and her colleague take their results to the airlines to find out what, if anything, they have to say about all their maggot-breeding hamburger water. What was their reaction? You know, it was mixed, but basically it was denial. So at that time, the EPA and the FDA didn't make airlines test their water, so they really had no idea what was in there either. In the article, one airline's response to the journal's water testing was that the tests were not scientific.

The spokesman for another large airline told the Journal the water was, quote, absolutely drinkable.

But how could they really say, if they weren't testing the water, how could they really claim it was clean? Exactly. Good question. Nancy publishes her findings in the journal. They're not peer-reviewed, but it's the Wall Street Journal. People take notice. The story goes, and I wish I had a different word to describe a story, gaining more attention, but I don't, viral. Which means in 2002, it gets picked up by other outlets, passed around the blogs.

And most importantly, Nancy's question, which had infected her via Zachary, catches the curiosity of another interested party, the EPA.

After our story ran, the EPA established our work group in early 2002 to evaluate the drinking water program. They met with the airlines, they discussed the issue, and then in the fall of 2003, they started asking for sampling of water. And then by the fall of 2004, they conducted its own sampling, and they found that water supplies on 15% of the flights that they tested were positive for total coliforms.

So even the EPA said it considered that to be high. In 2011, the EPA issues the Airline Drinking Water Rule, the national rule covering all airlines operating in the United States. We asked the EPA for comment on the story. After months of friendly exchange, they finally said, quote, Our water folks are extremely busy and handling lots of interview requests at the moment, so they had to decline. Apparently June was a busy month for water in the United States.

They did, however, direct us to the text of the aircraft drinking water rule, the ADWR. The relevant statute can be found at 40 CFR Part 141 Subpart X. And here, I found the source of the rumor that had bothered Antony, that had been repeated to him by all these flight attendants. This crazy idea that the airlines only had to watch the tanks once a year, despite all of Nancy's reporting.

These people believe this, but when I actually checked the ADWR in Table B1, Routine Disinfection and Flushing and Routine Sample Frequencies, it says, airline tanks must be cleaned once a year. The rumor is true. The rules say an airline can clean their tanks as little as once a year, although then they have to test more frequently. Or they can test once a year, but then they have to clean the tank more frequently, quarterly. This testing regimen is the grand result of the Wall Street Journal's reporting.

At least once a year. That is not... Does it feel high to you? No, it doesn't at all. Which is why I'm still paranoid. Nancy, for her part, continues to avoid airline coffee.

But to me, at the risk of being the idiot who keeps asking the stupid question, I still felt like I didn't understand. Like, does it matter if the tanks are cleaned once a year? If the tanks are cleaned once a year or tested once a year, what does that actually mean for the quality of the water? Sushi is raw fish. That is a true fact. If that's the only thing you knew about sushi, you'd have an incomplete understanding of it. Nancy's article was published 20 years ago. The EPA issued its airline drinking water rule 12 years ago.

So in 2023, when some flight attendants still warn against the water, when my friend Anthony is carrying multiple Yetis onto his flights, I wanted to know, are they being paranoid? Or is the airline water bacteria-ridden and gross? Is the coffee safe to drink? Or is it still made with hamburger water? So I started looking for research. And what I found is that about once a year, there's this little mini cascade of stories online about how airline coffee might not be very good for you.

But when you look at the sourcing on those stories, they almost always lead back to the same place. An unusual character who haunts the web. An online researcher who goes by the nom de internet of the diet detective. Do you mind just explaining to me like who you are and what you do for a living?

Sure. My name is Dr. Charles Plotkin, and I am an author, a researcher, entrepreneur. And every year, mostly every year for about 15, 18 years, I did an airline food study for a column that I used to write that was syndicated throughout the United States called Diet Detective.

Dr. Charles Plattkin's an academic. He's the founder and director of the Center for Food as Medicine. But really, it's his work as a diet detective, publicizing things like the potential hazards of airline water and food, that seems to get him the most attention. His website assiduously lists all the places he's appeared. USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Oprah, Time, Newsweek, Ladies Home Journal, Men's Health, Shape, Self, and Fitness.

The Today Show, ABC News, Nightline, National Public Radio, CNN, CNBC, CBS's early show, the BBC, and others. His path into this question about airline coffee that has yielded so much attention, he says it started with one of his readers asking about it. It grabbed him, the same way it grabbed me and so many others. Although for Plotkin, the question has an obvious answer. There is no way he personally would drink coffee on an airplane.

According to him, even now, the airline water is just too questionable. He doesn't trust the ADWR, the rule designed to protect us. He's not convinced that airlines really follow it. And he says, even if they do, the rule is just way too weak, especially compared with the kinds of rules governing the safety of water on land.

I know this is a terrible pun, but this airline drinking water rule is a watered-down version of what the national drinking rules are. Wait, the rules on airlines are weaker than they are just in general for water drinking regulations? Oh, significantly, significantly weaker. Why though? Because it's still the same human beings drinking the water. Yes, I of course agree. But the national primary drinking water regulations, the NPDWR, look at microorganisms.

The disinfectants that are used, disinfection byproducts in organic chemicals, organic chemicals. And so they look at all those things. Whereas on aircrafts, they're only looking at coliforms and whether or not there's E. coli, which is just one component of a microorganism.

Coliform is the category of bacteria that the airlines do test for. One of the bacterium that Zachary, the 13-year-old, found back in his experiment in 2002 was a coliform. So coliform is, and I even have the correct pronunciation that I looked at, and this is how you say it. Coliforms. In case you can't tell what's going on here.

The dye detective just pulled up one of those internet pronouncer doohickeys so we could hear a pronouncer for the word coliform.

At this point, the diet detective wanted to tell me about some hideous bacteria, not hideous bacteria that had been found in modern airline water, but hideous bacteria which he thinks could possibly be there, since these are kinds of bacteria that are not specifically being tested for. So you test for contaminants. Again, it's hard to pronounce some of these words. Here's one. Legionella. Legionella. And? Cryptosporidium. Cryptosporidium.

So these are just some of the ones that are not tested for. So what you're saying is that the regulations that govern the water that I would drink at home or at a restaurant, they're testing for all these different hard to pronounce microorganisms. But once I get on a plane, they're really just testing for coliform. And so there could be tons of other stuff in there.

Yes, exactly. So that's the, but if that's the sort of national standard, you also separately tested the water, right? No, I didn't separately test the water. Oh, you looked at the results from the tests. I hadn't understood this from all the media appearances, but the dye detective was not doing what Nancy Keats from the Wall Street Journal or Zachary from Home School had done. He wasn't actually gathering water samples from airlines and testing them himself. He was just going off to airlines to own water tests, which the government mandates that they publish.

I looked at those published numbers. JetBlue, one of the worst offenders, had 354 violations over eight years. To me, that's actually not such a big deal. JetBlue flies hundreds of thousands of flights a year. I actually like those odds. But that's just me. I also use the porta-potties at Burning Man. From the diet detective's perspective, the people on those 354 flights winning the reverse bacteria lottery are not going to be happy.

And besides, he says he suspects that the airline's data might be artificially low. This is just self-reported data. So let me just emphasize that. Self-reported data. I'll say it one more time. Self-reported data. Okay. Are you suggesting that the data may be something that we should be more skeptical of because it's self-reported? Of course.

One of the things making this show is already reminding me is that despite all the opinion and speculation and argument and certainty that exists, particularly online, despite all that, the world, once you start to ask very basic questions about it, often reveals itself to be surprisingly undermeasured. The Diet Detective is strongly suggesting that the real picture of airline water is probably much nastier than the airlines are letting on.

And he's not alone in this. Nancy Keats from the Wall Street Journal still avoids airline coffee, as does Zachary Bjornson Hooper, who is now an adult microbiologist. But I don't know. I'm not saying we should trust the airlines. I would not tell you to trust anybody. That's up to you. But there's something about the basis for the diet detective's assumption that just strikes me as, if not unfair, at least unsatisfying.

I wanted to talk to someone who had measured the water themselves after the EPA had issued their new regulations. Ideally, someone independent. Ideally, an actual microbiologist. And eventually, we did. That's after the break.

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So PJ is a really Irish name. Lots of PJs. Patrick, Joseph. Really? Yeah, lots of PJs. Dr. Adley is a microbiologist who lives near Limerick, the town in Ireland. She has spent her career studying bacteria in different food and water systems. She says in general, water systems tend to be understudied.

Water is the only commodity that gets distributed en masse to us by the powers that be, which means that, with some notable exceptions, most people, most of the time, are able to take water quality for granted in America. In most parts of the country, water is getting tested once, sometimes even twice, every single day. Dr. Adly explained to me how that heavily tested, heavily controlled water makes its way from the municipal source to your cup of airplane coffee.

So let me go from the start. Water from airlines comes from municipal suppliers, say JFK. JFK is airline water. Somewhere along there, they have their water supplies for the island, or maybe there's different sections. And so they're regulated by the EPA. It's the same water that goes into all the households that they get, except the households get it from

the pipes coming from their reservoir into their houses. The airlines pipe water into a big storage tank in JFK, and then from that, they fill up water tankers like fuel tanks and drive them out to where the airplane is stored on the tarmac or in the hunkers or wherever. They have to bring in food, they clear the rubbish, they fill the water tank if necessary. They will do it on a scheduled basis. Okay.

So internal flights within America, all airlines will have a contract organization which will test the air quality of their airplanes, the water quality. So therefore, it's centralized and very highly controlled and tested. But now, say we go to international flights and we go from San Francisco to Thailand or someplace like that.

Long-haul flight, you're going to get your water in Thailand. And so the same controls and regulations may not exist. Right. Your water is as safe as the water comes out of the tap. But they would have to look at the regulations if they were going to take it on. So Dr. Adly is saying that even before it enters the airplane, the water is going through all these safety checks.

It's why the diet detectives point that there's laxer standards for airplane water than there are for municipal water. It's not actually so damning, at least according to Dr. Adly. Airplane water starts out its life as municipal water. That municipal water is taken and then put into the water tank on the airplane. So if you think the airplane water is badly contaminated, your theory has to be that something nasty is happening either in its transportation into the plane or in the tank itself.

Anthony had asked if there are maps or diagrams showing the design of the water tank and where it sits on the plane. The answer is yes. I've seen a couple of them online. I found one from an online aviation blog called simpleflying.com. I will drop it in the newsletter if anyone's curious. But basically, there's a big water tank, and when the water arrives on the plane, that's where it goes. And from there, that water feeds everything else. The toilets, the sinks, first class, coach, it's all the same water.

So yes, the same tank of water is feeding both the bathroom faucet and the hot water spout for the coffee. And that tank, we know because of government regulation, can be cleaned as little as once a year. And now I could finally ask a microbiologist, is that a safety issue? How can you only clean a tank once a year and not have it be contaminated with something nasty?

Because the water going into it is, it's treated water and it's circulating. The water's going in, the water's coming out. So you're getting fresh water in constantly into the tank.

And only when the plane is totally serviced would the tank be totally cleaned out and soaked in a disinfectant for days and rinsed out. Otherwise, the water is like from your tap. You don't clean out your tap. If you have a boat, you might clean out the water tank every year. I don't. So, yes, it's an annual clean out for an airplane.

on their annual service. I see. So, okay, here's a related but different question that this is making me wonder about. When I go to sleep at night, I pour myself a glass of water, and I can never figure out how often that glass of water needs to be cleaned because in my mind, I think like, I understand that for most people, it's like every day you would then go wash that glass of water, but I'm kind of like, well, it's getting rinsed out. I'm not going to give myself a disease that I have

According to airline rules, I could clean that glass of water by my bed once a year. No. No. Your glass is open and exposed to the air. I see. This tank would be enclosed. I see. And your glass is going to be exposed to your lips. And I don't know, you might have had a curry or a Chinese or a pizza. So you'd have left maybe some organic residues on the glass rim lipstick. I see. Okay.

In other words, Dr. Adly is telling me not to be so disgusting. She says as far as the planes go though, they're filled up with clean water and that water is stored in a clean airtight tank once it's on the plane. And again, according to the data that the airlines self-publish, bacteria is sometimes but rarely found. Dr. Adly did end up testing this water herself. She published peer-reviewed studies in 2015 and 2017 describing her experiment, which took place in the Dublin airport. She and a student did the work together.

And their tests looked a whole lot like Nancy Keats' test back in 2002. What did you find when you looked at the water? Well, we found the microbiology was fine. We found that chlorine levels could spike, and that was an issue in that the new person doing it wasn't familiar with the concentrations they were supposed to use. So the way you're describing it, it sounds like relatively safe. Absolutely. Absolutely.

One caveat about the science here. Dr. Adly's study was conducted on one airline at one airport over the course of several months, which means even though they found that the water was clean and safe to drink, Dr. Adly herself says you can't necessarily extrapolate this spot check to the rest of the industry. That said, Dr. Adly, a microbiologist who studies water systems for a living, she seems deeply unconcerned about this whole thing.

Ultimately, what you're saying is it is safe to drink coffee on airplanes. Yeah. And I will drink coffee and I'm going flying on Sunday. And if they're going to serve it, sometimes they're not even serving it now. But I will have tea and coffee on an airplane. I need it. And would you brush your teeth in the bathroom? No, I wouldn't. Would you wash your hands in the bathroom? Yes. Okay. And I'd use the soap, soap and water. After two months of wondering about this question...

I'd gotten a pretty good answer. Before Anthony had first asked me if I drank the coffee on airplanes, my relationship to bacteria had been perhaps too chill. I adhered to the science of the five-second rule. I happily chowed down on office Skittles left out in a bowl, touched by many fingers.

do you drink coffee on airplanes had begun the process of taking that away from me. I was still behaving like a slob, but my brain was slowly turning into a kind of black light, visualizing bacteria everywhere. Recently, I flew to a family reunion. On the second day, my sister offered me a bite of what she insisted was a very good salad. She offered me her fork, which had very recently been in her mouth. I felt like she was trying to get me to eat a diaper filled with COVID.

For the first time, I pictured all sorts of horrors, invisible, on the fork's tines. We often decide what to worry about, what to be afraid of. I tried to remember, as stupid as I am, as much as the world confuses me, I am the descendant of the monkeys who somehow ate the right berries, who had enough fear to survive and did not need to go out and find extra fear. I ate the salad. It was fine. And on the flight back, I had a coffee on the plane.

I told Dr. Adly that this is where I'd landed. That for me, being on airplanes would just, again, be a place where I did what I've always done.

surrendered to the experience. Right, which is sort of the definition of being on an airplane. You're not in control of any part of your environment. You're at the mercy of a corporation. Yeah, the air quality in the airplane, you're at the mercy of them and you're at the mercy of the pilot that he knows what he's doing and the mechanics who serviced your plane. So there's a lot more risks than the water in an airplane flight. Well, that's what's interesting about my friend. The more we talked about it, he has a lot of fear of

He doesn't like the lack of control that an airline brings. And he's afraid of getting sucked out the window. He's afraid of the plane crashing. And for whatever reason, all that worry for him seems to sometimes focus on the water. Well, sure. Yeah. What do you make of that?

Well, maybe he feels more comfortable. He feels that he can control the water by taking the bottle into the bathroom. And that's psychology, so I'm not a person of psychology. Oh, you might be right. Yeah, no, he told me he had a whole system. So he brings a water bottle into the bathroom, and then he brings a thermos with coffee. Coffee with him. Yeah, so that he can drink coffee. I'm surprised he's allowed to bring it through all those...

He brings the empty water bottle through customs, and then once he gets through customs, he goes to Starbucks in the airport. Oh, yeah, I don't get that. Yeah, that makes sense, yeah. Which means that he's assuming that Starbucks has clean water. Which is probably the same water that the plane has got. Wait, really? Yeah, it would come through. It would be the same water. The same reservoir. Yeah, the same reservoir. Yeah. Yeah.

So he's, basically, I think what he's doing is he can't control the mechanics. He can't control the pilot. He can't control anything in the plane. And he can control the water. And that gives him comfort flying. A few days after Dr. Adlai and I spoke, I caught up with Anthony and I told him the news. A few days after that, he texted me a photo from up in the air. In his hand, a cup filled with a piping hot airline beverage.

But anyway, nice talking to you. Nice talking to you, Dr. Adlai. And congratulations on your new weekly program, and I wish it every success. Oh, thank you, Dr. Adlai. Yeah, and that it will work well for you. Yeah, we'll see. I both thrive and suffer in uncertainty, but I find it very exciting. Yeah, yeah. He'll challenge Josh Rogan then one of the days. We'll see.

That's Search Engine this week. After the break, a few announcements from our new show. Save on Cox Internet when you add Cox Mobile and get fiber-powered internet at home and unbeatable 5G reliability on the go. So whether you're playing a game at home... Yes, cool! ...or attending one live...

Thank you for listening to the launch episode of Search Engine.

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Right now, our show is primarily supported through advertisements, but your extra support helps us fund weird side projects. Like, for instance, this year, we have begun running our own version of this airline coffee experiment. We have been collecting hot water on airline flights and sending it to a lab to test. We should have some results to share with you later this year. Results you will be able to find in the newsletter. You can also subscribe to the free version if you want. Again, it is just pjvote.com.

Also, if you are listening right now, thank you. You are here in the beginning with us. Another way you can help this project work, to repeat a tired podcast canard, is to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It does really help. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me and Shruthi Pimaneni, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Theme and sound design by Armin Bazarian. Fact-checking by Elizabeth Moss. Show art by Ali Moss. No relations.

Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Richard Pirello, and John Schmidt.

And to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Casey Klauser, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Shuff. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Special thanks this week to child prodigy turned adult microbiologist, Zachary Burenson-Hooper, pilot Anas Maz, and everyone else who spoke to us for this story.

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