Why are airlines STILL making the announcement “This is a no smoking flight”? As if a smoker just has to maybe wait for another flight which may allow him to smoke.
It just seems that its been so very long since one was allowed to smoke on an aircraft, that they would finally stop making this annoying announcement. Is it a federal law that forces the airline to make the announcement?
When was the last time a flight originating in the US allowed smoking? Are there any flights in other parts of the world that still allow smoking?
There are indeed a few, if only a few, airlines left that do not ban smoking as a matter of principle; examples include Garuda Indonesia and Cubana. Obviously even on these airlines smoking is prohibited if it concerns a flight to or from a jurisdiction that has legislation in place that all incoming or outgoing flights have to be non-smoking, but on other routes they can still allow it.
Last year I was taking Amtrak and they gave the “No Smoking” spiel at the start. About a half hour later they gave the same sppech again, but this time with the tone of “We caught someone smoking. If it happens again you’re getting kicked out at the next stop.”
Does the law make them have to announce it as “This is a no smoking flight” instead of “No smoking allowed” or anything else that doesn’t suggest that there are also “smoking flights”?
I can’t imagine a world which allowed smoking on planes. Aside from all the smoke having nowhere to escape to, which must have made the planes very unpleasant, isn’t it dangerous to have open flames in a plane?
Yes, open fire was always a stupid idea on airplanes.
The entire supply of air is replaced on board every few minutes. There is more ventilation on modern airplanes that there is in modern houses or office buildings. So it’s hardly a case of “nowhere to escape to”.
You would think so, but in fact there are no passenger airliner fatalities which are attributable to smoking-related fires. Varig Flight 820 (1973) crashed due to a fire which was quite likely caused by a cigarette left in a rear toilet garbage receptacle, but no definitive cause for the fire was determined.
Smoking on planes was used to make plane travel terrible. There was a non-smoking section that people would walk through while smoking anyway, and the smoke level at the rear restrooms was unbelievable by contemporary US standards.
IIRC, I’ve been on some flights where they change it to something like “Air Midwest is a non-smoking airline so this flight and all of our flights are non-smoking flights…”
It was horrible. The last smoking flight I was on was in about 1994 from LAX to Toronto. I was so hungover I could barely function, and although I was in non-smoking the smoking section was right behind me. That was one looong flight.