Flight attendant warns passengers not to drink plane coffee or tea. Then she reveals what the drinking water shares with the rest of the plane

Flight attendant Riley Stellato (@rileydunsworthstellato) made a video sharing her biggest pet peeve, which, in the process, revealed that ordering coffee and tea while on a flight should probably be avoided whenever possible.

While Stellato’s pet peeve isn’t that coffee or tea is ordered in the first place, BroBible, when reporting on her story, cited an article from Food and Wine about why coffee and tea should be avoided on flights, which was based on another TikTok made by Kat Kalamani, who claims to have previously worked as a flight attendant for years. The simple answer is because it’s not as sanitary as you might hope.

Aircrafts have one shared water tank, and it’s not cleaned enough

The water for toilets, washing hands, and making drinks all comes from the same source when you’re on an airplane, simply by design. That’s not inherently bad, but the problem is that those tanks aren’t exactly clean, as Frommer’s explains by breaking down a study on airline water safety.

The study rated the water of 11 major airlines and 12 regional ones on a five-point scale. To have its water considered relatively clean and safe, the airline had to score a three. Only two major airlines and one regional airline that were included in the study managed to pass that three-point threshold. This means that, according to that study, most airlines don’t have water that’s safe to drink.

Kalamani claimed in her video that, aside from the water tanks not being cleaned often enough, the coffee machines on planes were also not cleaned often, if at all. One budget airline avoids the risk of waterborne illness by simply not offering snacks or drinks.

The way you order drinks matters to your flight attendant

Returning to Stellato’s pet peeve TikTok that kicked off the conversation about whether coffee and tea should be ordered on a flight, she shared that her biggest issue is that flyers don’t tell her their full request when they want a coffee. Instead, she’ll make a coffee and give it to a passenger, who then asks for cream and sugar.

In her video, she says, “I never understand why people don’t order, ‘Hi, may I have a coffee with cream and sugar.'” As a flight attendant, she has an entire plane of passengers waiting to be asked if they want a drink, or maybe some peanuts or pretzels.

Looking at the comments, Stellato’s pet peeve is shared by other flight attendants who decided to chime in. As such, the recommendation for ordering coffee on a flight is to say exactly how you want your coffee when you first order it to avoid making the attendants’ jobs more difficult.

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