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Comment by ginko | Hacker News Reader

That got me thinking. Would airlines still be allowed to have (tobacco) smoking flights if they chose to? As far as I can tell smoking is banned on US domestic flights, but what about international? I guess worker's safety regulation would be the main hurdle?

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The main hurdle with smoking on a plane is, actually, safety. Not in the sense that a smoker literally lights up the plane, but in the sense that the pilots would have a much harder way of telling when there is a real fire since the smell tends to distribute well throughout the closed interior.

Once I heard a pilot announce out of the blue, non-scripted and during the time they were not supposed to, that smoking is prohibited and I spent the next third of the flight thinking that either someone smoked in the restroom or we have a fire in the baggage compartment.

As a passenger, I am yet to encounter a plane where smoking is allowed (and I have flown Air Serbia, so take that for what you will).

I was wondering if there could be a system involving HEPA filters and some air exchange with the outside where it sucks all the smoke and pumps clean air in an effective sense that the person next to me could be smoking but I wouldn't get any (practically) smoke but just clean air.

Maybe I failed to communicate the point. I believe noticing smoke (from an actual fire) is the reason you can’t smoke (a cigarette) on a flight.

The same reason makes it dangerous to filter out smoke. You smell the smoke ASAP, you have a chance of emergency landing; you have a super advanced system that takes smoke out and feeds oxygen in… well, good luck with an actual cargo fire.

Were there a lot more undetected airline fires in the 70s and 80s due to this? I haven't heard of that before so it's interesting to hear about it in the sense of safety and not health.

Why 80s? I follow airline incidents (ATC comms, investigations, etc.), fires and/or smoke come up every now and then. Sometimes cargo, sometimes passenger flights. Fires tend to start in cargo compartments. In case of passenger flights, it doesn’t matter whether it is cargo fire or rogue cigarette smoke—the protocol is still emergency landing (as I mentioned, if you decide to roll with cigarette smoke and because of that you don’t notice an actual, critical fire due to some busted lithium-ion battery in cargo early enough, this could be the difference between life and death). Just a few months ago a passenger flight had to do this in South America.

Because smoking was banned on airlines in the, US at the end of the 80s...so if it's due to a safety related ban, there would have been a decline in the number of emergency landings due to cigarette smoke being mistaken for an uncontrolled fire.

The source of smoke should be irrelevant. Either it’s an actual fire, or it’s something that prevents you from noticing an actual fire. (Or at least that’s what I, as a passenger, would hope pilot’s attitude would be. Airplane smokers should endure the full experience of emergency landing and all the respective delays, because if they persist they are putting everybody at risk.)

Also, you seem to assume passengers actually stopped smoking since the ban. Presumably, people smoke less, but at least now it’s more clear to the pilot that something is definitely out of order when there’s smoke.

Vaporizers to the rescue. No tobacco needed.

Just dump your substance of choice into the cabin HVAC system. No need for individual passengers to manipulate heat sources. No need for them even to take off their masks!

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