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Comment by quantified | Hacker News Reader

... and the last ashtrays disappeared a few years back.

I wonder if our space tourism rockets will have no smoking signs in the cabins.

Ashtrays are still required in toilets and perhaps somewhere else, since it's very preferable that idiot smokers don't dump their butts into paper-filled rubbish bins before getting arrested.

> ... and the last ashtrays disappeared a few years back.

No they didn't. Aircraft are still legally required to have ashtrays, at the very least, in the bathrooms.

I find this very amusing.

Apparently airlines started banning smoking in the 1980s, but an industry ban was enacted in 2000. Maybe this will be the decade they decide to pull the ashtray requirement.

The ashtrays are there in case someone is smoking contrary to the regulations. If they put the still-smouldering cigarette in the bin, it can cause a fire (particularly in the toilet, where most of the bin contents will be paper towel). It's sensible to keep the ashtray requirement.

! I must locate it when I fly next.

I flew transatlantic in 2024 on a brand new A350 and it still had an ashtray in the bathroom door. I think it is going to be a while until they remove those.

They never will. It's for safety reasons on those who won't comply so they don't burn down the plane accidentally.

How many noncompliance incidents are there per year for no smoking ( like the crew finds the ash/buts in the tray or other evidence)? Is it tracked? Never is a very, very long time. Smoking may not be a thing in a few more decades.

Isn't that because some customers want the ashtrays, and it's cheaper to just add them to everything.

The signs and the ashtray are a belt and suspenders approach to mitigate a situation where a lit cigarettes starts a cabin fire. Humans don't follow signs with 100% reliability, so the ash tray is a backup. They're on the plane for safety reasons, and required by law, even where smoking is also prohibited by law.

It's hard to believe that "some" private customers have more sway over the plane manufacturing market than international airlines (the majority of which have banned smoking).

It's not a matter of sway. If 1 purchaser wants an ashtray, it's cheaper to add it to every plane than anything else. And, assuming that one purchaser cares enough to not buy your plane, it seems worth it to make a hundreds of millions of dollar sale. Of the airlines refused to buy planes with ashtrays, as opposed to not caring, that would be a different thing

Airplanes are not made in anywhere near the kind of volumes where the economies of scale would preclude profitably changing one interior part.

Airbus and Boeing both make significant customizations for each airline. Some have entirely custom seating configurations. An ash tray is nothing. The reason they're on the plane is safety requirements.

Just the mass of gum in those ashtrays probably cost several gallons of fuel per flight.

I doubt the mass of gum in an airplane ashtray would add even a single extra gallon to the fuel burn.

The least efficient plane[0] burns 1 gallon per passenger every 64 miles. A 3,000 mile flight will burn 47 gallons of fuel per passenger.

A stick of gum can be up to 7 grams[1]. Let's assume it's even heavier once chewed, and is a nice, round 10 grams.

If we assume the mean passenger weighs only 50kg (or, 5,000 pieces of gum), then each piece of gum is responsible for 9.4 milligallons of fuel for that trip. Or 1.2 fl-oz.

Now if we consider that there is gum all over the plane, maybe a soda-can's worth of jet fuel is burned up ferrying it all around. But that's with optimistic passenger weights, pessimistic gum masses, a gas-guzzler of a jet, and probably a calculation error I've made converting between all the different units above.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Airli...:

> On the other side, the least efficient was British Airways at 27 pax-km/L (3.7 L/100 km [64 mpg‑US] per passenger), using fuel-inefficient Boeing 747-400s with a low density of 0.75 seat/m2 due to a high 25% premium seating, in spite of a high 82% load factor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum#Product_varieties

> Chewing gum can come in a variety of formats ranging from 1.4 to 6.9 grams per piece, and products can be differentiated by the consumers' intent to form bubbles or the sugar/sugarless dichotomy.

"No vaping", more likely.

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