I think we can all agree that no matter what the airlines claim about their cleaning procedures, airplanes are still pretty gross overall. In fact, as a frequent traveler, I was bringing along Lysol Wipes and giving a swipe to the tray table, headrest and other touch points in my (tiny) seat space long before COVID made that a thing. It's a practice I still continue almost immediately on arriving at my seat to this day!

And for good reason! A 2015 study by TravelMath, a search engine that answers data-related questions about travel, tested samples from hard surfaces in planes and found that tray-table surfaces had more than eight times the amount of bacteria per square inch than even the lavatory flush buttons. The trays had 2,155 colony-forming units of bacteria per square inch; in comparison, a home toilet seat typically has 127, according to the National Science Foundation.

So where are the germiest places on an airplane? Read the full story to find out!