[MPWTravels]

I flew on Air Canada Flight 087 from Toronto to Shanghai, China on 19 May. The flight was scheduled to be 14 hours. Throughout the flight, one by one, the toilets stopped working until we had 3 hours left in the flight and the final toilet stopped working. The flight attendants told me that the ground crew had forgotten to empty the toilet holding tanks in Toronto prior to leaving and that they were now full and that was why they were not working. They still had the contents in from the last long haul flight. They said it was not an issue with a clog in the system or the pipes freezing up. So, with 3 hours left to go, the pilot decided to make an unscheduled landing at Tokyo Narita airport to empty the toilets. It would have been tough to go 3 more hours without toilets--which I agree with.

This added 2.5 hours to our already long flight and caused many of us to miss connections or scheduled appointments all due to an avoidable error that Air Canada made.

In addition to this, 4 of the flight attendants decided to leave the plane in Tokyo because they were going to go over their allowable working hours. This caused further delay as we had to get customs officials out to the plane to let them off. The other 10+ flight attendants agreed to stay on and continue the flight, which was good otherwise I'm not sure what would have happened. (They had 2 redundant sets of pilots on board, so it wasn't an issue for them.)

While this was an unfortunate incident and a very annoying delay, it really made me question the safety at Air Canada. First, if they forgot to complete a ground check to verify that the toilets were empty, I wonder if they forgot any other more important safety checks? Second, did allowing the other 10+ flight attendants to stay on and work over their allowable hours cause any safety concerns?

Overall, I was very disappointed with Air Canada over this incident and in retrospect concerned with potential safety issues. I would definitely think twice before flying with them again.