How Dirty is the Water on Your Airline? Carriers Flying from Houston Among Worst, Study Shows

Sept. 19, 2019
According to the findings of a study conducted by DietDetective.com and the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center at the City University of New York, the quality of drinking water varies by airline.

While hydration is an important element of air travel, you might want to pay a little bit extra to get it before you board your plane.

On Wednesday, DietDetective.com and the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center at the City University of New York released an airline water study for 2019.

The results were not pretty. Particularly for airlines that fly out of Houston.

According to the findings, the quality of drinking water varies by airline. What's worse, many airlines have possibly provided passengers with unhealthy water.

Unhealthy water violates the federal government's Aircraft Drinking Water Rule (ADWR), which was implemented in 2011. The rule mandates that airlines provide safe drinking water to passengers and members of the flight crew.

The study ranked a total of 23 airlines (11 major and 12 regional) primarily by the quality of water they provided on board its flights. Each airline was given a "Water Health Score" (5 = highest rating, 0 = lowest) based on metrics in 10 categories.

Those categories included ADWR violations, positive E. coli and coliform water sample reports, fleet size of the airline, and their respective willingness to cooperate with researchers.

A score of 3.0 or better indicates that the airline has relatively safe, clean water.

Houston-based Continental Airlines was not included in the study  results.

The 2019 Airline Water Study also discovered that the Environmental Protection Agency - one of the federal agencies responsible for ensuring safe aircraft drinking water- hardly ever assigns civil penalties to airlines in violation of ADWR standards.

Above, you can check out which national and regional airlines have the dirtiest and cleanest water, including those flying out of Houston's Bush and Hobby airports.

Here are a few key notes and findings:

The "Shame on You" Award goes to the EPA and nearly all major airlines (regional airlines weren't contacted) for their very poor response time and lack of cooperation answering detailed questions. 

Testing for coliform bacteria is important, because their presence in drinking water indicates that disease-causing organisms (pathogens) could be in the water system.

An aircraft flies to numerous destinations and may pump drinking water into its tanks from various sources at domestic and international locations. The water quality onboard also depends on the safety of the equipment used to transfer the water, such as water.

If you want to read more about the total methodology of the study, you can click here.

Peter Dawson is a digital reporter in Houston. Read him on our breaking news site, Chron.com, and on our subscriber site, houstonchronicle.com. | [email protected]| Sign up for breaking news alerts

———

©2019 the Houston Chronicle

Visit the Houston Chronicle at www.chron.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.