SHANGHAI — Some inhabitants near Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport are reporting something far more odious than the usual noise pollution.
According to Zhou, who lives just south of Shanghai in Luchaogang, even on sunny days, he can see "golden raindrops" falling down, accompanied by a bad smell, the Dongfang Daily reported.
The droppings, which Dongfang Daily referred to as "fecal rain," accumulate on locals’ cars and their night-time duvets put outdoors to air out. Since Luchaogang is located under the Shanghai airport flight path, local inhabitants blame arriving aircraft, which in the morning land every five to 10 minutes.
A Pudong airport staff member told the Dongfang Daily that modern aircraft now all have a vacuum system for collecting all human waste into a sealed fecal tank. Even if the system breaks down, the exrement should stay in the tail of the plane and not to be discharged in the air.
However, a maintenance crewman at China Eastern Airlines, while insisting that the vast majority of Chinese civil aircraft today have adopted the new vacuum collecting system, admitted that "old planes still have stool collection containers that are not tight enough and the situation where the feces leak out can indeed occur," the Xinhua news agency reported.
After the initial press reports, Pudong airport has promised to investigate whether some aircraft toilet collecting systems have cracked or leaked.
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