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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.

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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.

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