Blue ice (aviation)
formed by leaky aircraft waste tanks
In aviation, blue ice is frozen sewage material that has leaked mid-flight from commercial aircraft lavatory waste systems. It is a mixture of human biowaste and liquid disinfectant that freezes at high altitude. The name comes from the blue color of the disinfectant. Airlines are not allowed to dump their waste tanks mid-flight, and pilots have no mechanism by which to do so; however, leaks sometimes do occur from a plane's septic tank.
Danger of ground impact
There were at least 27 documented incidents of blue ice impacts in the United States between 1979 and 2003. These incidents typically happen under airport landing paths as the mass warms sufficiently to detach from the plane during its descent. A rare incident of falling blue ice causing damage to the roof of a home was reported on October 20, 2006, in Chino, California. A similar incident was reported in Leicester, England, in 2007.
Other documented incidents include:
In 1971, a chunk of ice from an aircraft tore a large hole in the roof of the Essex Street Chapel in Kensington, London, and was one trigger for the demolition of the building.
In November 2011, a chunk of ice, the size of an orange, broke through the roof of a private house in Ratingen-Hösel, Germany.
The public source identifies “Blue ice (aviation)” as formed by leaky aircraft waste tanks. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Blue, aviation and formed.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q750542. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1979, 2003, 2006 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Blue ice (aviation)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.