Bathroom vs. lavatory: Which word flies with editors?

Many busy newsroom copy editors increasingly are letting an essential section aboard an aircraft slip by without changing its description to lavatory from bathroom, grumbles Grumpy Editor. 

Two Sunday incidents in the air referred to a lavatory as a bathroom. 

A bathroom is defined as “a room containing a bath or a shower and usually a wash basin.” 

(Taking a shower or bath at 35,000 feet would be nice, especially on a cross-country flight.) 

Lavatory refers to “a room fitted with equipment for washing the hands and face and usually with flush toilet facilities.” 

Bathroom was widely used in two separate stories focusing on air incidents on security-conscious Sunday that marked the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. 

With both words highlighted below --- 

A Fox News story mentioned that on a Los Angeles-to-New York American Airlines flight, three passengers made repeated trips to the bathroom.  It added that on an earlier Denver-to-Detroit Frontier Airlines flight, the crew reported two people were spending much time in a bathroom.  

The second paragraph in an Associated Press story cited, “The bathroom use by some passengers aroused the suspicion Sunday.” 

A following paragraph pointed out that with the American Airlines flight from Los Angeles, three passengers who made repeated trips to the bathroom were cleared after the plane landed at New York's Kennedy Airport. 

Meanwhile a Denver Post story had it right, reporting “The pilot aboard Frontier Flight 623 from Denver International Airport radioed the tower in Detroit about suspicious behavior onboard after two people stayed "an extraordinarily long time in the lavatory.”  

A Christian Science Monitor report used both words.  Referring to the Frontier flight, it said the crew feared that a passenger's frequent and unusually long trips to the aircraft lavatory on Sept. 11 were a sign that a potential terrorist plot was under way.  But then, the second paragraph described it as “peculiar bathroom breaks.” 

The Wall Street Journal’s version with the Frontier flight mentioned bathroom twice. 

However, bypassing use of bathroom or lavatory, London’s Daily Telegraph dropped in a down-to-earth description of the location of suspicious action aboard the aircraft.

The British paper’s version reported the Frontier crew said "two people were spending 'an extraordinarily long time' in a toilet."