When you could smoke on an airplane--and what you risk if you try it today
The first airline in the world to ban smoking on board was Turkish Airlines in the mid-1980s
Turkish Airlines
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It may have been because, if the saying 'smoking like a Turk' is true, the cabins of his planes must have been gas chambers. But it is still peculiar that it was, back in 1986, Turkish Airlines the first airline to ban smoking on board, albeit on flights lasting less than six hours. All the others, or almost all of them, took a decade or so longer, arranging the announcement in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Anyone in their 40s if the Will remember those boarding passes with the stylized cigarette symbol, which could be barred (non-smoking seat) or not (smoking seat). Just as today (not always) at check-in they ask you if you want a window or aisle seat (in case you have not already selected it online), they used to ask, "Smoking or non-smoking?" Sometimes the choice was there, sometimes not (often the smoking places, which were fewer in number than others, could be sold out).
The fact that you could not smoke in certain areas of the plane and were allowed to smoke in others (which seems unimaginable to us today, like thinking that you used to be able to smoke in a movie theater), was already a step forward, decided upon by the airlines in the 1970s as a matter of fire safety with the emergence of mass intercontinental transportation related to the appearance of the Jumbo 747 and DC-10. Because, so far, anyone could smoke in any area or cabin of an aircraft.
The vulgate has it that imposing some kind of limit on smoking came about following the crash of the Varig Rio De Janeiro - Paris flight (unlucky route...) caused by the spread of a fire started in one of the toilets: the Brazilian Boeing 707 crashed five miles from Orly Airport on July 11, 1973, killing 123 people.
Smoking/non-smoking could be alternating (i.e., with the front part of the cabin non-smoking, the middle part smoking, and the rear part still non-smoking), or bi-zoned: non-smoking front cabin and smoking rear cabin (smokers were generally placed in the back). All seats, indiscriminately, had armrests equipped with ashtrays, which in non-smoking areas used to be used as garbage holders (more often as chewing gum holders), which have now completely disappeared from shipboard equipment.
In Europe, the decisive year for the total abolition of smoking on board was 1997when the European Union banned it among all member states and their companies. But in Italy the total ban had been introduced as early as 1989. Turkish, which had led the way more than a decade earlier, banned smoking on all its flights two years later, in 1999. In 2000 it was the turn of the United States. Other less 'developed' countries had to wait a long time: Cuba introduced smoke-free flights in 2014 and China even in 2017, that is, two years after the ban on the use of electronic cigarettes on board or carried in carry-on or checked baggage was also introduced in the United States (and following in Europe).
What if, in a fit of rapture, one lit a cigarette at an altitude of 10,000 meters, what would one risk? Fines of thousands of dollars or euros are expected in both the U.S. and the EU (in the U.S. from $2,000 to $4,000). But anyone attempting to tamper with a smoke-detection device placed on board (a classic, in the toilets) or resisting a flight attendant's order to immediately put out a cigarette (or cigar) risks prosecution and trial. And perhaps even lynching by other passengers.
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