Planes are full, patience is short, and the last refuge of personal space on a typical flight could be gone if one airline gets its way. And then there was one ... toilet that is.

In a trade-off for lower fares, Ryanair, the airline that epitomizes the love-hate relationship many flyers have with budget carriers, is in talks with manufacturer Boeing to certify its 737s to have only one toilet. Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary suggests that fares overall could drop five percent if two out of the three toilets are replaced by six additional seats. He also states that passengers aboard his aircraft rarely use all three toilets. Having once proposed charging passengers a fee for using the toilet and even installing "standing room only" seating in its aircraft, the airline certainly isn't short on ideas to make more money or to garner publicity.

The idea of having only one toilet on an airplane may not fly with passengers, but surprisingly no rules would be broken either. It turns out there are no regulations that mandate a toilet-to-passenger ratio. There exist minimums for the number of flight attendants per groups of passengers; minimums for emergency exits per groups of seats and rows; but there are no toilet minimums. In fact, if you've flown frequently enough, you may have been on a flight with one non-functioning toilet. Despite the inconvenience, such occurrences hardly ever ground an aircraft. The smallest commuter flights have no washroom at all. On short flights of one to two hours it probably wouldn't be too much of an issue. But what would passengers do on flights of four hours or more? Ryanair's longest flights average four hours and twenty-five minutes.

Skeptics find it unlikely that Boeing would move forward with the certification of a one-toilet 737 with six extra seats, but the company has declined to comment on conversations it has had with its airline customers in the past. Many passengers dismiss the headline-grabbing, corporate brainstorms of airlines like Ryanair as mere publicity stunts, but they do so with their watchful eyes on the other airlines. Just what if one of these "crazy" ideas actually catches on?

It's interesting to note the following comment from the so-called blogosphere about the possibility of having to compete for toilet time with nearly two hundred other people. "You cram people in, strap them down, make it difficult to go and then you start handing out the diuretics like coffee and tea," he says. Though it has been tempting, we've spared you our own numerous bathroom puns for this article, but we do have one question for Mr. O'Leary. Just how do you know how many people get up to use the toilets on your planes?