The cost of repairing a toilet of an aircraft carrier

A complicated and expensive procedure

Toilets are essential for everyday life in every field, and the military environment is no exception. However, sometimes the major problems are excessive maintenance costs. That’s the case with Navy aircraft carrier toilets which can cost up to $400,000 to be fixed when they’re clogged. These high costs depend on the procedure needed to unclog them.

According to military.com, Sailors have to do a procedure called acid flush of the sewage system. This toilet problem has already been known since 2020 on the USS George H.W. Bush and USS Gerald R. Ford carriers.

Despite the Navy saying this is no longer an issue, fixing these toilets (which in the military jargon are called heads) is expensive and complicated so much that the government took an interest in the question.

Even back in 1986 a scandal involving the military for paying for toilet seats for airplanes for $640 each, alarmed the Pentagon because that meant a waste of money in the military field. Therefore, when the carrier issue happened, in 2020, in the face of upper costs, the Government Accountability Office started to investigate and found 149 more maintenance problems besides those of sewage, for a total of $130 billion, most of which were from acid flushes.

The GAO (Government Accountability Office) discovered that, given the number of individuals using carriers’ restrooms, nearly 4,000 sailors’ toilets require a customized system similar to that used on commercial airplanes. The GAO estimated that each acid flush would cost close to $500,000. Even in 2020, employees of the monitoring organization were unsure of how many acid flushes would eventually be necessary. “An unplanned maintenance action for the entire service life of the ship”, the GAO referred to the procedure.

The entire cost of the acid flushes could not be determined by the GAO and the full cost impact was difficult to assess because the navy had not yet decided how frequently and for how many ships this action would need to be repeated.

In the carriers mentioned in the report, 94% of the restrooms, according to the Navy, are operating as they should. The service department thinks the obstructions are caused by the sailors flushing illegal stuff. However, we should give the Navy the benefit of the doubt that the toilets are now functioning well as no other government monitoring mechanism has mentioned the toilet issues on carriers since 2020.

However, this demonstrates how expensive it is to keep a carrier running. Along with the costs of major overhauls and refueling nuclear reactors, such routine maintenance costs are incurred. This procedure is now being carried out on two carriers in the Newport News yard, hoping that employees aren’t wasting time by looking around the sewage system when they could be working on more important tasks.