One interesting lesson from airships is about disruption and how people take old assumptions into new paradigms.
Today we're used to being on plans for short periods of time. We get on, sit down, wait, and then arrive at our destination. Airships came about when long distance travel meant you were spending multiple days in a vehicle, either a train or boat.
An airship was a place that was set up for you to spend a few days on it, so it was set up more like a boat, with a place to stay, lounge, and eat; than a plane where you don't stay on it for an extended time.
We sometimes see this in new technologies where someone holds onto assumptions of the past.
These places still exist, but you need to look for them. Here in Japan, some remote islands, you can travel overnight boat. I love those. There might be a speed boat or plane, but I love boarding the boat in the evening, everyone feels like having a party, sleeping in a bed and arriving fresh in the morning. (If you are in Tokyo, the nearest is Oshima Island).
There is also slow rail travel, with pretty trains, sleeper car and restaurant. I think Europe has sleeper trains too. I am also interested to go to Europe once by the trans Siberian railway.
Flying a turboprop from Yakushima to Kagoshima on my way back to Tokyo was a highlight of my trip. Especially the domestic airport lounge with shoe-less tatami mat areas to hang out.
I remember as a child using a sleeper ferry to get between Jersey and the British mainland. Politically Jersey is ours (it's not technically part of the UK but it's a crown dependency), but geographically it's basically in France. Seems like these days there is no overnight option but the long slow ferry from up the coast does take like half a day to get there and you can book a room so you can get some sleep.
I've taken the ferry from southern Italy(bari) to Croatia and back multiple times. It's a great way to travel. There's a camaraderie on a boat you just don't get on an airplane. Also helps that I can bring my car with me!
The Baltic has a bunch of overnight ferry routes too. Most of them are not very luxurious, but its a nice way to get both travel and sleep done in one go.
That is similar to how some of these boats look like, just more modern. Here is an example with pictures https://www.ferry-sunflower.co.jp/en/ (disclaimer, I never went that route, the ones I went with were less glamorous, more modern, but still nice)
But yeah, it is mostly one night, because the distance is within Japan.
I felt a bit similar about electric cars with a trunk in the front where the engine would sit in an ICE car. But that's more about esthetic expectations, like the first cars looked similar to horse carriages.
I don’t dislike electric cars, but I don’t poop every 3 hours, and it doesn’t take 30 minutes to do so.
When EVs can reliably (including charging infrastructure) do charging as fast as ICE refuels, with 300 miles/500 km between 20-80%, they will win with most people in the US and Canada. Otherwise, we just drive too far, too often. It’s not far off. But until then, it’s not truly a replacement for ICE. Yes, I really do drive for 4-5 hours without stopping, several times a year.
It’s really amazing just what extent people went to in order to smoke. Apparently people smoked on submarines for a while. And planes. And everywhere else. Smoking is just such a disease and it feels like only now are we kind of getting a handle on it.
Story time. Last summer I flew from ATL to SFO on a brand new Airbus. Pretty cool plane! Halfway across the count I had the obligatory restroom break. In the head, I noticed an ashtray. I was confused -- "smoking has been banned in planes doe decades. Why is there an ashtray here?"
I flagged down a flight attendant and asked them. Their answer was that yes smoking is banned, and it's a $250 fine. But EVERY SINGLE TRIP from ATL to SFO, someone decided it is worth it and the ash trays give them a safe place to put it out. The flight attendants wait outside the lav after the smoke alarm goes off with the ticket.
It's actually mandated by the FAA that an ashtray be present in the restrooms:
> (g) Regardless of whether smoking is allowed in any other part of the airplane, lavatories must have self-contained, removable ashtrays located conspicuously on or near the entry side of each lavatory door, except that one ashtray may serve more than one lavatory door if the ashtray can be seen readily from the cabin side of each lavatory served.
And the plane literally cannot fly with an inoperable or missing ashtray.
It's counterintuitive, but I've heard an explanation that the alternative - they decide to dispose their cigarette into the bin full of flammable paper waste - is much worse.
If you're wealthy enough $250 is just the price of smoking (especially for someone that can afford a 1st class seat). I wonder why they don't have escalating non-monetary punishments?
I assumed you were talking about who I know as james Simons, but just googled him to make sure there wasn't someone else, and yeah - first pic on Google is him with a cigarette. Also learned it was lung cancer that took him out, though he did make it to 86 which isn't bad.
The ashtrays are there, even today, because it is suspected that this flight [0] went down when someone disposed a cigarette butt in the lavatory trash, causing a fire.
A reminder that aviation regulations are written in blood.
> A reminder that aviation regulations are written in blood.
It's enormously expensive for an airframe manufacturer to deal with the fallout of a crash.
There aren't any engineers in an airframe manufacturer willing to sign off on a faulty design. Some good engineers are so worried about that they get shifted to working on conceptual projects.
I took a loooong time for Boeing to convince the FAA that a twin engine jet was safer than a 4 engine for ocean crossings.
this plane did not crash, it made an emergency landing 2 miles from the airport in an onion field. Only 10 crew and 1 passenger survived. The other 123 souls aboard died of smoke/CO inhalation from the fire.
the sole surviving passenger, 21-year-old Ricardo Trajano, disobeyed the instructions to remain in his seat.
“In the mid 1970s smoking was allowed virtually everywhere; by 2000 there were only two allowable smoking areas-each approximately 6 feet by 6 feet-one in the engine room and one up forward.
[…]
In 2009, a working group was established to prepare for a December 31, 2010 deadline for prohibiting smoking below decks on deployed submarines”
That paper also says:
“In 1993, based on reports of the dangers of secondhand smoke, Captain Stanley W. Bryant, the commanding officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, announced a ban on smoking aboard the ship starting in July 1993 and proposed eliminating tobacco from the ship's store. These actions elicited a strong and swift tobacco industry response. As described by Offen et al., tobacco friendly members of Congress challenged the policies and enough pressure was generated to force the reversal of both the ban on smoking and the prohibition of cigarette sales aboard the ship”
My time in submarines at sea just coincided with the last few years where smoking on submarines was still authorized.
It was awful, just awful. Especially in a space as cramped as a submarine and with a common ventilation system, you can't just put the smokers in a convenient spot all to themselves, they're always going to be near something the rest of the crew needs to access.
Several years ago I had a brief stop at some airport-- maybe Atlanta? But they had an indoor smoking area. I smoked at the time so I followed the map, and you could see the smoking area from the balcony on the floor above.
It was a glass cube maybe 10 feet across, and it was crammed full of people. Completely full, like those Japanese trains. And there was a crowd of people outside waiting to get in.
I went outside. It was pretty nice, there was no one around.
Cinemas were the annoying ones for me, even more so than airplanes. I remember going to see E.T. when it came out and the cloud of smoke from all the parents puffing away made it hard to see the damned screen.
I don't know if sailors can smoke on an aircraft carrier, but with all that gas and bombs around, it seems like a no-brainer to ban it.
As a former Air Force brat, I remember the horrific stench of stale smoke in the AF office buildings. My parents were about the only adults I knew who didn't smoke. I bought my 72 Dodge in the 1980's, and it still smells like cigarettes.
Of course there were smoking and non-smoking sections on airplanes. The same air recirculated through the entire airplane, and the non-smoking section began the very next row after the smoking section.
on the contrary, I strongly believe that tobacco companies are the driving force behind the attempts to equate vaping and smoking. idk about the current year, but tobacco companies had little to no influence over the vaping market during its early years. the hardware was 5% American from small companies and 95% Chinese, the nicotine fluid had local producers everywhere because of how cheap and easy it is to make. almost all early adopters were people who wanted to quit smoking, and a lot of them succeeded.
and it's not harmless, sure, but it's definitely less harmful than inhaling combustion products of pulverized tobacco waste glued together with a mix of a hundred mystery chemicals.
I think the argument is that vaping is far more addictive for young people because of exactly what you say. Does not feel harmful and they end up very addicted at higher doses of nicotine than cigarettes
the flavorants are fairly mysterious, yeah. we know diacetyl is bad to inhale, we don't know how many others are. but if you DIY, only propylene glycol and nicotine are strictly required. vegetable glycerin and flavorants are optional.
I'd choose even the most mysterious Chinese bathtub e-juice over cigarettes though.
I'm not sure this is actually bad. Nicotine, when divorced from the tar of burning cigarettes, has a number of desirable affects on alertness and appetite (as well as less desirable effects like increasing blood pressure) - it's not clear to me that avoiding nicotine as a stimulant is always desirable.
As well, vaping is so much less obnoxious to the people around you than traditional smoking (either tobacco or marijuana). I'm in favor of a lot of the social and legal pressure that has been put on smoking tobacco in public (and I think it should apply to weed as well despite being pro-legalization). But most of the actual issues go away if it's vaping and of smoking (and all of them go away if you're getting your tobacco via a pouch).
I honestly still find vaping obnoxious and I’m clearly not alone here because most places that ban smoking also ban vaping too.
And weird for someone to talk about vaping like it’s a good thing when we already know there are adverse health implications from vaping. What we don’t know is just how serious that is. But why take the risk in the first place?
I’m not sure how you could possibly argue that nicotine has mainly desirable effects. Merely being highly addictive on its own is a pretty badly overriding negative effect.
No, the context was getting a handle on smoking, not some alternative goalpost. As lung cancer rates plummet from lack of second hand smoke nobody should ever lament that even if people are doing something else not great.
Yeah, but nicotine itself can still be problematic for mental health. It really depends on what you consider an "adverse problem".
I had been using the pouches for a couple of years now, and the unbearable anxiety from its nonstop use caused me to slow it way down. I went from a can a day to less than a can a week. I had already quit all other forms of nicotine before the pouches. What a wild ride.
Because the anxiety is unlikely to just be from nicotine alone, I also got myself into somewhat better shape to cope. Maybe some anxiety is healthy if it drives better choices, but it still feels awful. I'm now glad with my current state, but I would not recommend this path to here.
It's also very dependent on where you live I think.
I'm in NY (not NYC) and it's rare to find anyone smoking.
When I visited Türkiye last year, I've never seen so much smoking in my life. Not just walking around the streets, but people smoking at restaurants that had seats outside. This could be a small place with 3-4 tables all within a couple of meters of each other.
It was one of my first thoughts too, but related to that somewhat is that it also amazes me how people used to be a lot more “daring” or “pragmatic” (the quotes indicating that I’m not quite sure what to call it) in a way that did not scare them to consider and weigh the risks and conclude that it was not only feasible and possible, but that it was also worth adding a smoking room to a hydrogen filled balloon.
There are many other similar examples of this “daring” that seems to have all but been neutered by globalist standardization that has all but destroyed actual diversity in the West and has seemingly lowered tolerances of and for risk.
I’m not sure if it’s quite the same and maybe it’s just a function of the technology levels of roughly up to the 1990s, but it feels like China in general has something similar to that same kind of “daring” today, based on the unique and innovative things I see in China.
I also suspect the modern digital news cycle and potential lawsuits have impacted the levels of risk acceptable. In China, with devastation in living memory, the population are generally willing to take more risks, and there's less of a culture of litigation. Plus, there's always the government who can dampen any viral social media outburst.
Of course, some standards (fire safety) are important. Looser standards are allowable where the customer can make a reasoned judgement of risk.
> adding a smoking room to a hydrogen filled balloon
Is it really all that different from an airplane filled with aviation gas? There are plenty of terrible crashes from planes that caught fire in the air, and just about every crash into the ground results in a terrific fire.
I’ve been told by someone who was in the service that when smoking was no longer allowed on submarines, it made a huge difference in the cleanliness of machinery and thus how much work was required to maintain it.
Yeah, I’d love some of that goodness in my lungs, please.
> It’s really amazing just what extent people went to in order to smoke.
My parents' generation, the boomers, weren't really aware that smoking was bad. Even if some knew, I feel like it was mostly hidden from them. Look at any movie they'd watch in the west when they were young, people would be smoking everywhere: inside offices, inside cars, public servants at the town hall, etc. Smokers everywhere.
Once the studies eventually came out showing how bad it was, addicted people kept smoking but there's been way less new smokers.
Now I see my kid's gen (so the grand-kids of the boomers): hardly anyone is smoking. It's not a thing among that generation.
As to the gen Xer who used to smoke: most of friends in that segment are now vaping.
Addicts are typically going to be addicts: be it alcohol or tobacco. We're getting a handle on it for the boomers are now dying left and right and it's been a long time smoking ain't being portrayed as being cool anymore.
My dad, as navigator, flew 32 missions in B-17s over Germany. Many of his buddies were chain smokers. The problem was, you could not keep a cigarette lit at 30,000 feet. The crew all wore oxygen masks, as they'd die without one.
So what the smokers would do is, take a deep breath and unhook the mask. Then blow on the cigarette while lighting it. The cigarette would burn like a torch. Then take a deep puff on the cigarette. Put the mask back on and take another deep breath, while the cigarette sputtered and threatened to go out. Take the mask off and then blow on the cigarette to get it going again (like a torch).
My dad would laugh and laugh while he relayed this desperate dance to smoke.
I've never seen this story in books/movies about B-17s. So here it is for posterity!
> My parents' generation, the boomers, weren't really aware that smoking was bad.
As a boomer, I say "baloney".
For starters, my dad grew up in the Depression. His schoolmates called them "coffin nails". Doctors routinely prescribed "stop smoking, you fool".
In 7th grade, one of my teachers (incidentally, a Holocaust survivor), smoked constantly. He'd also spend half of class time coughing up a lung. My best friend in high school smoked constantly, and told him his doctor told him his lungs were damaged and he better quit. He kept smoking.
But the worst was when I was 8, and toured an agricultural museum at K State. There were two jars with lungs in them, one from a non-smoker, and the other a smoker. The non-smoker lungs were pink and looked healthy. The smokers - black! All black! It was horrific.
Besides, anyone who cut open a dead body knew instantly if the deceased was a smoker. No sane person would conclude the black, scarred lung was healthy.
All the boomers knew the bad effects of smoking. They just thought they were invulnerable.
In the first half of the 20th Century war was the leading cause of a great many men and some women dying in their 20s and 30s .. and to a lesser degree at later ages (if in occupied territories, etc).
Dying young drags "life expectancy" figures (especially those calculated "from birth") but doesn't necessarily impact the likelihood of dying (say) "within the next 5 years" if you're already (say) 55.
Eg. Many people that survived war in the early 20th Cent still managed to live to a ripe old age past their 60s.
When I was a kid, back eons ago, smoking was everywhere. People who didn't smoke had ashtrays for guests. Telling people to not smoke was simply not a thing. When I was about 16, some family friends put a small sign on their front door requesting people not smoke inside their house. I was shocked. I liked the idea, but I'd never seen that before, never even considered it. I recall wondering how many people would be offended enough to stop visiting.
Yeah, I'm just barely old enough to remember flying when you could smoke on planes.
It was everywhere. The smell of stale cigarette smoke was in nearly every public space. This was in the 80s in the US, so smoking was already in decline, but the smell was still this constant background presence.
I vaguely remember living room chairs with built in ash trays (like how some have cup holders now).
And in the late 90s, being on a plane and the chairs had a metal folding door on the armrest that exposed an ash tray. Smoking on planes was already gone or going away, but the hardware lingered for quite some time.
It makes you wonder how accurate the smoking cancer stats are. IF everyone smoked, presumably this means a lot of people who are not recorded in the stats despite smoking or former smokers, lowering the mortality rate or risk factor, although obvious smoking is still bad.
If the "normal" rate of lung cancer is X, the observed rate in nonsmokers who get secondhand smoke is X+Y, and the observed rate in smokers is X+Y+Z, if you compare nonsmokers and smokers it looks like smoking increases your rate by Z when it's actually Y+Z.
this agrees with my point because non-smoker are being counted in cancer risk. we're only interested in people who choose to smoke. public smoking bans make secondhand smoke less risky/relevant as a factor. we're only interested in the risk , independent of secondhand smoke, of someone choosing to smoke getting cancer.
> we're only interested in the risk , independent of secondhand smoke, of someone choosing to smoke getting cancer.
No, that's where you're wrong.
You are only interested in that independent risk.
I, and many others, are interested in how much smoking changes that risk.
Picking random numbers, let's say smoking gives you a 10% chance of lung cancer. It's fine for you to only care about that 10% number, you get to care about what you want to.
But for the rest of us, when making informed decisions based on risk, it matters whether smoking changes it from 9.9% to 10%, or 0.1% to 10%.
I don’t know if it would help anyone else, but personally, watching the movie The Insider kind of permanently put me off from smoking. Jeffrey Wigand is/was an incredibly inspiring figure and I think of him every time I see cigarettes.
Even though may parents didn't smoke, and there was a lot of anti-smoking education around me, I grew up around a lot of smokers.
What did it for me was watching my uncle have a rather painful death in his 50s because he couldn't stop drinking and smoking. (He went into alcohol withdrawal in the hospital after lung surgery.)
That being said, I did smoke a few when I was in my early 30s. Something about nicotine just put weird thoughts in my head a few days after smoking a cigarette: One day I was biking home and the thought "it would be a good idea to have a cigarette before making dinner" popped into my head. I never touched cigarettes after that.
Cigarettes are more addictive than people who've never tried them realize. It's not just a matter of will power, something about nicotine manipulates your motivations in a very subconscious way.
This story reminds me of the game Oxygen Not Included.
> The smoking room was kept at a higher pressure than the rest of the ship so that no leaking hydrogen could enter the room
I haven't yet played any other game where air pressure in a room relative to the rooms surrounding it could mean the difference between life and death. Without really meaning to I gained an intuitive understanding of physics by just trying not to asphyxiate my dupes. Gold standard for edutainment.
>The smoking room was perhaps the most popular room on the ship, which is not surprising at a time when so many people smoked, but its popularity was no doubt enhanced because it was also the location of the [Hindenburg’s bar](link).
Back in the 50's tonsillectomies were a regular rite of passage for kids, especially in colder places where kids spent more time indoors exposed to smoke. A couple years after moving from Maiibu to Toronto, I had the surgery.
I remember years ago movie theaters in Hong Kong allowed smoking. If I remember right, it wasn't in the back, like on planes, but the seats to the one side of the center aisle.
Hindenburg was originally designed to use helium, but The US banned the export of helium. Helium was rare and expensive to manufacture and only the US made it in sufficient quantities.
> The real danger of allowing smoking on a hydrogen airship — and the reason it was strictly confined to the closely monitored smoking room — was the risk of a fire;
I'd say... contrary, allowing smoking in a dedicated controlled place was the safer option. The real danger was not allowing smoking because if you ban smoking, people will smoke no matter if it's banned - and back then, there were a looooot more smokers, so a loooooot more opportunities for someone to behave utterly braindead.
That's also why every modern airplane to this day has ashtrays in the lavatory. There WILL be someone smoking at some point, and better provide them with a safe option to discard the butt than risk having the person throw the butt in the trash bin where it can set the waste ablaze.
There’s a video on the first link of a landing in Belgrade that’s deeply funny. “We departed late and arrived early, A Boeing 737 would never be able to do that”
“Why are you reading out numbers to me like I am an old man”
> The real danger was not allowing smoking because if you ban smoking, people will smoke no matter if it's banned.
This same concept is why full prohibition never works. People who want to do something will find a way and it often comes at the cost of being more harmful to society than if they were allowed to do it in a controlled environment.
That's always what I've said too, so I'm now proposing to put all the "want to be murderers" together with folks who want suicide assistance. Make one move, get two results or whatever they say.
Your reply is reasonable. I've always thought the biggest problem to almost anything is human. We sometimes make the most thoughtless decisions and justify them with the flimsiest of excuses. We marvel at the stubbornness of two year-olds, then ignore ourselves.
> "The real danger of allowing smoking on a hydrogen airship - was the risk of a fire"
Maybe. They had diesel engines, 240 Volt and 24 Volt electric generators, 200 Watt battery powered radio transmitter, backup radio transmitter, a 5.7 million candle power searchlight, an electric oven and hob galley. It's not like there were no risk of heat or combustion anywhere else on the airship.
No, the passengers were in a gondola off the bottom of the airship, the lift gas was concentrated at the top of the airship, some 100 feet above, above an asbestos ceiling. The real dangers were:
- being early in the days of flying. One airship disaster (the British R101) was the airship being extended, not tested carefully, and rushed into service for a political deadline. Another had the vents sealed shut so it hit its altitude ceiling. The Graf Zeppelin was one of the safest aircraft ever flown - a million miles without accident in the 1930s when aeroplanes were crashing a lot. Even the Hindenburg disaster killed 35 people, most of its passengers and crew survived.
- Using cow intestines stitched together by hand to make the Hydrogen lift cells. The stitching leaves holes which could let air mix with the lift gas.
- Many airship accidents were related to mooring, and having humans grab onto mooring lines and having humans try to pull a 7 million cubic foot balloon against the wind and that going wrong.
If we can now do high pressure Hydrogen powered cars, tanks of it in gas stations in urban areas and Hydrogen powered aircraft, and people think that can be safe, we ought to be able to achieve room temperature and pressure airship lift gas with it more safely than they could in the 1920s.
"The passenger accommodation aboard Hindenburg was contained within the hull of the airship (unlike Graf Zeppelin, whose passenger space was located in the ship’s gondola)."
Feels like this may run into a no true scotsman but this is demonstrably false if you look at the number of marijuana smokers in countries where they impose severe penalties (up to life) on them
One interesting lesson from airships is about disruption and how people take old assumptions into new paradigms.
Today we're used to being on plans for short periods of time. We get on, sit down, wait, and then arrive at our destination. Airships came about when long distance travel meant you were spending multiple days in a vehicle, either a train or boat.
An airship was a place that was set up for you to spend a few days on it, so it was set up more like a boat, with a place to stay, lounge, and eat; than a plane where you don't stay on it for an extended time.
We sometimes see this in new technologies where someone holds onto assumptions of the past.
These places still exist, but you need to look for them. Here in Japan, some remote islands, you can travel overnight boat. I love those. There might be a speed boat or plane, but I love boarding the boat in the evening, everyone feels like having a party, sleeping in a bed and arriving fresh in the morning. (If you are in Tokyo, the nearest is Oshima Island).
There is also slow rail travel, with pretty trains, sleeper car and restaurant. I think Europe has sleeper trains too. I am also interested to go to Europe once by the trans Siberian railway.
You’d love Canada and the US. Nothing but slow travel on trains.
No one takes the train in the US because they don't go anywhere you need to go and aren't nice to be on.
Flying a turboprop from Yakushima to Kagoshima on my way back to Tokyo was a highlight of my trip. Especially the domestic airport lounge with shoe-less tatami mat areas to hang out.
> I think Europe has sleeper trains too.
Europe has sleeping boats too: you can go from, say, south east of France to the Baelaric island (like Ibiza) in 12 hours overnight.
I remember as a child using a sleeper ferry to get between Jersey and the British mainland. Politically Jersey is ours (it's not technically part of the UK but it's a crown dependency), but geographically it's basically in France. Seems like these days there is no overnight option but the long slow ferry from up the coast does take like half a day to get there and you can book a room so you can get some sleep.
I've taken the ferry from southern Italy(bari) to Croatia and back multiple times. It's a great way to travel. There's a camaraderie on a boat you just don't get on an airplane. Also helps that I can bring my car with me!
The Baltic has a bunch of overnight ferry routes too. Most of them are not very luxurious, but its a nice way to get both travel and sleep done in one go.
I think you miss the point. Think of the movie Titanic, where people were on the boat for a very long time, as opposed to merely an overnight trip.
That is similar to how some of these boats look like, just more modern. Here is an example with pictures https://www.ferry-sunflower.co.jp/en/ (disclaimer, I never went that route, the ones I went with were less glamorous, more modern, but still nice) But yeah, it is mostly one night, because the distance is within Japan.
The eastward trips took 53 to 78 hours, it resembled more boat or train trip than flight.
I felt a bit similar about electric cars with a trunk in the front where the engine would sit in an ICE car. But that's more about esthetic expectations, like the first cars looked similar to horse carriages.
But here the space also have the role of serving as a crumple zone in case of frontal collisions
If you can put something in it it doesn't count as crumple zone and the car has to be engineered with a separate crumple zone anyway.
VW Beetle?
I've lost count of the number of people who I've had to explain that, on long trips, you don't "stop to charge." You charge where you stop to poop.
I don’t dislike electric cars, but I don’t poop every 3 hours, and it doesn’t take 30 minutes to do so.
When EVs can reliably (including charging infrastructure) do charging as fast as ICE refuels, with 300 miles/500 km between 20-80%, they will win with most people in the US and Canada. Otherwise, we just drive too far, too often. It’s not far off. But until then, it’s not truly a replacement for ICE. Yes, I really do drive for 4-5 hours without stopping, several times a year.
It’s really amazing just what extent people went to in order to smoke. Apparently people smoked on submarines for a while. And planes. And everywhere else. Smoking is just such a disease and it feels like only now are we kind of getting a handle on it.
Story time. Last summer I flew from ATL to SFO on a brand new Airbus. Pretty cool plane! Halfway across the count I had the obligatory restroom break. In the head, I noticed an ashtray. I was confused -- "smoking has been banned in planes doe decades. Why is there an ashtray here?"
I flagged down a flight attendant and asked them. Their answer was that yes smoking is banned, and it's a $250 fine. But EVERY SINGLE TRIP from ATL to SFO, someone decided it is worth it and the ash trays give them a safe place to put it out. The flight attendants wait outside the lav after the smoke alarm goes off with the ticket.
It's actually mandated by the FAA that an ashtray be present in the restrooms:
> (g) Regardless of whether smoking is allowed in any other part of the airplane, lavatories must have self-contained, removable ashtrays located conspicuously on or near the entry side of each lavatory door, except that one ashtray may serve more than one lavatory door if the ashtray can be seen readily from the cabin side of each lavatory served.
And the plane literally cannot fly with an inoperable or missing ashtray.
It's counterintuitive, but I've heard an explanation that the alternative - they decide to dispose their cigarette into the bin full of flammable paper waste - is much worse.
If you're wealthy enough $250 is just the price of smoking (especially for someone that can afford a 1st class seat). I wonder why they don't have escalating non-monetary punishments?
You'd think they'd just ban repeat offenders.
Jim Simons got so tired of paying these, he bought a private plane to save money. To say he was a prolific smoker is an understatement.
I assumed you were talking about who I know as james Simons, but just googled him to make sure there wasn't someone else, and yeah - first pic on Google is him with a cigarette. Also learned it was lung cancer that took him out, though he did make it to 86 which isn't bad.
Then there's George Harrison, who died of lung cancer way too young.
Gross.
> ash trays give them a safe place to put it out
ha. i always thought they were remnants from old airplane plans that were too much effort to update to remove them. thanks for that
The ashtrays are there, even today, because it is suspected that this flight [0] went down when someone disposed a cigarette butt in the lavatory trash, causing a fire.
A reminder that aviation regulations are written in blood.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varig_Flight_820
> A reminder that aviation regulations are written in blood.
It's enormously expensive for an airframe manufacturer to deal with the fallout of a crash.
There aren't any engineers in an airframe manufacturer willing to sign off on a faulty design. Some good engineers are so worried about that they get shifted to working on conceptual projects.
I took a loooong time for Boeing to convince the FAA that a twin engine jet was safer than a 4 engine for ocean crossings.
tldr for the wikipedia article:
this plane did not crash, it made an emergency landing 2 miles from the airport in an onion field. Only 10 crew and 1 passenger survived. The other 123 souls aboard died of smoke/CO inhalation from the fire.
the sole surviving passenger, 21-year-old Ricardo Trajano, disobeyed the instructions to remain in his seat.
Amazing that lighters are allowed in the cabin
> Apparently people smoked on submarines for a while.
More than ‘a while’. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4344412/:
“In the mid 1970s smoking was allowed virtually everywhere; by 2000 there were only two allowable smoking areas-each approximately 6 feet by 6 feet-one in the engine room and one up forward.
[…]
In 2009, a working group was established to prepare for a December 31, 2010 deadline for prohibiting smoking below decks on deployed submarines”
That paper also says:
“In 1993, based on reports of the dangers of secondhand smoke, Captain Stanley W. Bryant, the commanding officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, announced a ban on smoking aboard the ship starting in July 1993 and proposed eliminating tobacco from the ship's store. These actions elicited a strong and swift tobacco industry response. As described by Offen et al., tobacco friendly members of Congress challenged the policies and enough pressure was generated to force the reversal of both the ban on smoking and the prohibition of cigarette sales aboard the ship”
My time in submarines at sea just coincided with the last few years where smoking on submarines was still authorized.
It was awful, just awful. Especially in a space as cramped as a submarine and with a common ventilation system, you can't just put the smokers in a convenient spot all to themselves, they're always going to be near something the rest of the crew needs to access.
Several years ago I had a brief stop at some airport-- maybe Atlanta? But they had an indoor smoking area. I smoked at the time so I followed the map, and you could see the smoking area from the balcony on the floor above.
It was a glass cube maybe 10 feet across, and it was crammed full of people. Completely full, like those Japanese trains. And there was a crowd of people outside waiting to get in.
I went outside. It was pretty nice, there was no one around.
Cinemas were the annoying ones for me, even more so than airplanes. I remember going to see E.T. when it came out and the cloud of smoke from all the parents puffing away made it hard to see the damned screen.
I don't know if sailors can smoke on an aircraft carrier, but with all that gas and bombs around, it seems like a no-brainer to ban it.
As a former Air Force brat, I remember the horrific stench of stale smoke in the AF office buildings. My parents were about the only adults I knew who didn't smoke. I bought my 72 Dodge in the 1980's, and it still smells like cigarettes.
Of course there were smoking and non-smoking sections on airplanes. The same air recirculated through the entire airplane, and the non-smoking section began the very next row after the smoking section.
Fun fact, the air quality on aeroplanes got worse after they banned smoking, because they could cut costs by re-circulating the same air for longer.
Air isn’t recirculated on an airplane. It’s continually brought in from outside the aircraft
50% is recirculated, 50% is from the outside. Before the 80's it was 100% from the outside, though.
That statistic doesn’t mean much.
The question is how long does it take for all the air in the plane to be replaced.
Unfortunately we aren’t getting a handle on it because those friendly tobacco companies instead just pushed people to vaping instead.
on the contrary, I strongly believe that tobacco companies are the driving force behind the attempts to equate vaping and smoking. idk about the current year, but tobacco companies had little to no influence over the vaping market during its early years. the hardware was 5% American from small companies and 95% Chinese, the nicotine fluid had local producers everywhere because of how cheap and easy it is to make. almost all early adopters were people who wanted to quit smoking, and a lot of them succeeded.
and it's not harmless, sure, but it's definitely less harmful than inhaling combustion products of pulverized tobacco waste glued together with a mix of a hundred mystery chemicals.
I think the argument is that vaping is far more addictive for young people because of exactly what you say. Does not feel harmful and they end up very addicted at higher doses of nicotine than cigarettes
Vaping has its share of mystery chemicals too, though
the flavorants are fairly mysterious, yeah. we know diacetyl is bad to inhale, we don't know how many others are. but if you DIY, only propylene glycol and nicotine are strictly required. vegetable glycerin and flavorants are optional.
I'd choose even the most mysterious Chinese bathtub e-juice over cigarettes though.
Or, maybe do neither?
That’s still getting a handle on it. Vaping is not good but it’s significantly better than the tar that comes from burning cigarettes
In the context of the alternative which was “nobody really smokes or vapes” it’s not really a good outcome.
Sure, smoking rates cratered. It was great. But now vaping rates have gone up and it just didn’t have to happen that way at all.
Go back a few years and less people vaped with similarly low smoking rates. Vaping didn’t replace smoking, its net new usage.
I'm not sure this is actually bad. Nicotine, when divorced from the tar of burning cigarettes, has a number of desirable affects on alertness and appetite (as well as less desirable effects like increasing blood pressure) - it's not clear to me that avoiding nicotine as a stimulant is always desirable.
As well, vaping is so much less obnoxious to the people around you than traditional smoking (either tobacco or marijuana). I'm in favor of a lot of the social and legal pressure that has been put on smoking tobacco in public (and I think it should apply to weed as well despite being pro-legalization). But most of the actual issues go away if it's vaping and of smoking (and all of them go away if you're getting your tobacco via a pouch).
I honestly still find vaping obnoxious and I’m clearly not alone here because most places that ban smoking also ban vaping too.
And weird for someone to talk about vaping like it’s a good thing when we already know there are adverse health implications from vaping. What we don’t know is just how serious that is. But why take the risk in the first place?
What adverse health implications from vaping are there?
Still being studied, but the idea that it’s safe seems to be a very odd default.
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/e-cigarettes/health-effects.html
Why would your default assumption be that putting foreign (and poorly regulated) substances into your lungs is more likely than not safe?
This is especially true since it’s a drug that doesn’t even have much claim to fame for positive recreational or medicinal benefits.
I’m not sure how you could possibly argue that nicotine has mainly desirable effects. Merely being highly addictive on its own is a pretty badly overriding negative effect.
Here’s a paper that talks about the negative impacts on a wide variety of organs: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4363846/
No, the context was getting a handle on smoking, not some alternative goalpost. As lung cancer rates plummet from lack of second hand smoke nobody should ever lament that even if people are doing something else not great.
Classic “perfect is the enemy of good”.
There are now vaping bans that have pushed people to pouches.
The pouches are a totally different level of nicotine addiction. People will fall asleep with one in.
And unlike cigarette butts, they stick to the parking lot. Lovely!
The pouches are great, a clean way to get Nic with very few adverse health problems as a result.
absolutely not true
they erode your gums
and the accelerated rate of nicotine absorbtion probably has side effects we do not yet understand
Yeah, but nicotine itself can still be problematic for mental health. It really depends on what you consider an "adverse problem".
I had been using the pouches for a couple of years now, and the unbearable anxiety from its nonstop use caused me to slow it way down. I went from a can a day to less than a can a week. I had already quit all other forms of nicotine before the pouches. What a wild ride.
Because the anxiety is unlikely to just be from nicotine alone, I also got myself into somewhat better shape to cope. Maybe some anxiety is healthy if it drives better choices, but it still feels awful. I'm now glad with my current state, but I would not recommend this path to here.
It's also very dependent on where you live I think.
I'm in NY (not NYC) and it's rare to find anyone smoking.
When I visited Türkiye last year, I've never seen so much smoking in my life. Not just walking around the streets, but people smoking at restaurants that had seats outside. This could be a small place with 3-4 tables all within a couple of meters of each other.
Check the ancient shows Sex and the City and The nanny ... and you will see a different NY.
Yes, its incredible how much the culture around smoking changed in 25 years
It was one of my first thoughts too, but related to that somewhat is that it also amazes me how people used to be a lot more “daring” or “pragmatic” (the quotes indicating that I’m not quite sure what to call it) in a way that did not scare them to consider and weigh the risks and conclude that it was not only feasible and possible, but that it was also worth adding a smoking room to a hydrogen filled balloon.
There are many other similar examples of this “daring” that seems to have all but been neutered by globalist standardization that has all but destroyed actual diversity in the West and has seemingly lowered tolerances of and for risk.
I’m not sure if it’s quite the same and maybe it’s just a function of the technology levels of roughly up to the 1990s, but it feels like China in general has something similar to that same kind of “daring” today, based on the unique and innovative things I see in China.
I also suspect the modern digital news cycle and potential lawsuits have impacted the levels of risk acceptable. In China, with devastation in living memory, the population are generally willing to take more risks, and there's less of a culture of litigation. Plus, there's always the government who can dampen any viral social media outburst.
Of course, some standards (fire safety) are important. Looser standards are allowable where the customer can make a reasoned judgement of risk.
> adding a smoking room to a hydrogen filled balloon
Is it really all that different from an airplane filled with aviation gas? There are plenty of terrible crashes from planes that caught fire in the air, and just about every crash into the ground results in a terrific fire.
I’ve been told by someone who was in the service that when smoking was no longer allowed on submarines, it made a huge difference in the cleanliness of machinery and thus how much work was required to maintain it.
Yeah, I’d love some of that goodness in my lungs, please.
> It’s really amazing just what extent people went to in order to smoke.
My parents' generation, the boomers, weren't really aware that smoking was bad. Even if some knew, I feel like it was mostly hidden from them. Look at any movie they'd watch in the west when they were young, people would be smoking everywhere: inside offices, inside cars, public servants at the town hall, etc. Smokers everywhere.
Once the studies eventually came out showing how bad it was, addicted people kept smoking but there's been way less new smokers.
Now I see my kid's gen (so the grand-kids of the boomers): hardly anyone is smoking. It's not a thing among that generation.
As to the gen Xer who used to smoke: most of friends in that segment are now vaping.
Addicts are typically going to be addicts: be it alcohol or tobacco. We're getting a handle on it for the boomers are now dying left and right and it's been a long time smoking ain't being portrayed as being cool anymore.
A fun smoking story.
My dad, as navigator, flew 32 missions in B-17s over Germany. Many of his buddies were chain smokers. The problem was, you could not keep a cigarette lit at 30,000 feet. The crew all wore oxygen masks, as they'd die without one.
So what the smokers would do is, take a deep breath and unhook the mask. Then blow on the cigarette while lighting it. The cigarette would burn like a torch. Then take a deep puff on the cigarette. Put the mask back on and take another deep breath, while the cigarette sputtered and threatened to go out. Take the mask off and then blow on the cigarette to get it going again (like a torch).
My dad would laugh and laugh while he relayed this desperate dance to smoke.
I've never seen this story in books/movies about B-17s. So here it is for posterity!
> My parents' generation, the boomers, weren't really aware that smoking was bad.
As a boomer, I say "baloney".
For starters, my dad grew up in the Depression. His schoolmates called them "coffin nails". Doctors routinely prescribed "stop smoking, you fool".
In 7th grade, one of my teachers (incidentally, a Holocaust survivor), smoked constantly. He'd also spend half of class time coughing up a lung. My best friend in high school smoked constantly, and told him his doctor told him his lungs were damaged and he better quit. He kept smoking.
But the worst was when I was 8, and toured an agricultural museum at K State. There were two jars with lungs in them, one from a non-smoker, and the other a smoker. The non-smoker lungs were pink and looked healthy. The smokers - black! All black! It was horrific.
Besides, anyone who cut open a dead body knew instantly if the deceased was a smoker. No sane person would conclude the black, scarred lung was healthy.
All the boomers knew the bad effects of smoking. They just thought they were invulnerable.
it also did not seem to impact lifespan for them
dying in your 60s was par for the course until second half of the 20th century.
lead petrol, cigs, war, asbestos, lead paint in children bedroom
In the first half of the 20th Century war was the leading cause of a great many men and some women dying in their 20s and 30s .. and to a lesser degree at later ages (if in occupied territories, etc).
Dying young drags "life expectancy" figures (especially those calculated "from birth") but doesn't necessarily impact the likelihood of dying (say) "within the next 5 years" if you're already (say) 55.
Eg. Many people that survived war in the early 20th Cent still managed to live to a ripe old age past their 60s.
The boomers quit smoking decades ago.
I grew up mostly in a rural town, unwittingly away from lead gasoline fumes.
When I was a kid, back eons ago, smoking was everywhere. People who didn't smoke had ashtrays for guests. Telling people to not smoke was simply not a thing. When I was about 16, some family friends put a small sign on their front door requesting people not smoke inside their house. I was shocked. I liked the idea, but I'd never seen that before, never even considered it. I recall wondering how many people would be offended enough to stop visiting.
Yeah, I'm just barely old enough to remember flying when you could smoke on planes.
It was everywhere. The smell of stale cigarette smoke was in nearly every public space. This was in the 80s in the US, so smoking was already in decline, but the smell was still this constant background presence.
I remember a discussion whether it was rude to lit a cigarette at the dinner table before everyone had finished their meal or not.
I remember this. Ashtrays were practically part of the furniture (especially coffee tables), even if you didn't have a smoker at home.
Elementary school children would make ashtrays as gifts for Father's Day.
If dad didn't smoke, surely he had guests who did.
Yeah. I remember that too. It was such an odd thing to make at schools and kids clubs. But that’s through the lens of modern life.
I vaguely remember living room chairs with built in ash trays (like how some have cup holders now).
And in the late 90s, being on a plane and the chairs had a metal folding door on the armrest that exposed an ash tray. Smoking on planes was already gone or going away, but the hardware lingered for quite some time.
Think these bins persisted on some aircraft until fairly recently. Maybe 10 yrs ago?
Ha my first ceramic project in elementary school art class was an ashtray. Smoking was everywhere.
As was passing out cigarettes and cigars to all the guests, didn't see this so much in the USA but very common in Europe even into the late 1990s.
So true. My parents would bring out ashtrays when we had guests.
It makes you wonder how accurate the smoking cancer stats are. IF everyone smoked, presumably this means a lot of people who are not recorded in the stats despite smoking or former smokers, lowering the mortality rate or risk factor, although obvious smoking is still bad.
I would expect it to be the other way around.
If nearly everyone smoked, then even nonsmokers were constantly getting a fair amount of secondhand smoke.
This would raise the background rate of cancer, making it appear that smoking raises your risk by less than it actually does.
Non smokers did get lung cancer [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Castle#Illness_and_death
Yes, exactly my point.
If the "normal" rate of lung cancer is X, the observed rate in nonsmokers who get secondhand smoke is X+Y, and the observed rate in smokers is X+Y+Z, if you compare nonsmokers and smokers it looks like smoking increases your rate by Z when it's actually Y+Z.
this agrees with my point because non-smoker are being counted in cancer risk. we're only interested in people who choose to smoke. public smoking bans make secondhand smoke less risky/relevant as a factor. we're only interested in the risk , independent of secondhand smoke, of someone choosing to smoke getting cancer.
> we're only interested in the risk , independent of secondhand smoke, of someone choosing to smoke getting cancer.
No, that's where you're wrong.
You are only interested in that independent risk.
I, and many others, are interested in how much smoking changes that risk.
Picking random numbers, let's say smoking gives you a 10% chance of lung cancer. It's fine for you to only care about that 10% number, you get to care about what you want to.
But for the rest of us, when making informed decisions based on risk, it matters whether smoking changes it from 9.9% to 10%, or 0.1% to 10%.
About 1/2 of all people who ever died from smoking-related causes were non-smokers.
I don’t know if it would help anyone else, but personally, watching the movie The Insider kind of permanently put me off from smoking. Jeffrey Wigand is/was an incredibly inspiring figure and I think of him every time I see cigarettes.
https://youtu.be/MGOb29aePyc?is=CKyo1UM-dkiRHdWa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Wigand
Even though may parents didn't smoke, and there was a lot of anti-smoking education around me, I grew up around a lot of smokers.
What did it for me was watching my uncle have a rather painful death in his 50s because he couldn't stop drinking and smoking. (He went into alcohol withdrawal in the hospital after lung surgery.)
That being said, I did smoke a few when I was in my early 30s. Something about nicotine just put weird thoughts in my head a few days after smoking a cigarette: One day I was biking home and the thought "it would be a good idea to have a cigarette before making dinner" popped into my head. I never touched cigarettes after that.
Cigarettes are more addictive than people who've never tried them realize. It's not just a matter of will power, something about nicotine manipulates your motivations in a very subconscious way.
I never smoked because I knew I'd like it.
But there are a couple photos of me "smoking" as I was trying to look cool.
This story reminds me of the game Oxygen Not Included.
> The smoking room was kept at a higher pressure than the rest of the ship so that no leaking hydrogen could enter the room
I haven't yet played any other game where air pressure in a room relative to the rooms surrounding it could mean the difference between life and death. Without really meaning to I gained an intuitive understanding of physics by just trying not to asphyxiate my dupes. Gold standard for edutainment.
You might enjoy Hardspace: Shipbreaker.
I assure you pressure differentials will be life or death!
Fyi, you appear to be shadowbanned and it's not clear why. You might consider sending an email to admin to work that out?
Last paragraph:
>The smoking room was perhaps the most popular room on the ship, which is not surprising at a time when so many people smoked, but its popularity was no doubt enhanced because it was also the location of the [Hindenburg’s bar](link).
That’s how you keep a reader on the site!
Truly a better time - today we worry about using Rust 'unsafe' too often. They had a smoking room on a hydrogen airship!
/j
Back in the 50's tonsillectomies were a regular rite of passage for kids, especially in colder places where kids spent more time indoors exposed to smoke. A couple years after moving from Maiibu to Toronto, I had the surgery.
For those who are interested: a very recent Stuff You Should Know podcast episode was about the Hindenburg disaster: https://stuffyoushouldknow.com/episode/the-hindenburg-disast...
I remember years ago movie theaters in Hong Kong allowed smoking. If I remember right, it wasn't in the back, like on planes, but the seats to the one side of the center aisle.
Hindenburg was originally designed to use helium, but The US banned the export of helium. Helium was rare and expensive to manufacture and only the US made it in sufficient quantities.
I will use this as a metaphor of humanity!
That sweet sweet nicotine.
> The real danger of allowing smoking on a hydrogen airship — and the reason it was strictly confined to the closely monitored smoking room — was the risk of a fire;
I'd say... contrary, allowing smoking in a dedicated controlled place was the safer option. The real danger was not allowing smoking because if you ban smoking, people will smoke no matter if it's banned - and back then, there were a looooot more smokers, so a loooooot more opportunities for someone to behave utterly braindead.
That's also why every modern airplane to this day has ashtrays in the lavatory. There WILL be someone smoking at some point, and better provide them with a safe option to discard the butt than risk having the person throw the butt in the trash bin where it can set the waste ablaze.
Ah. I always thought it was because of flexibility and timespan of airplane use, but it sounds like you are right! Thanks. TIL.
https://simpleflying.com/why-airplnes-ashtrays-lavatories
https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2026/04/28/airplane-as...
There’s a video on the first link of a landing in Belgrade that’s deeply funny. “We departed late and arrived early, A Boeing 737 would never be able to do that”
“Why are you reading out numbers to me like I am an old man”
> The real danger was not allowing smoking because if you ban smoking, people will smoke no matter if it's banned.
This same concept is why full prohibition never works. People who want to do something will find a way and it often comes at the cost of being more harmful to society than if they were allowed to do it in a controlled environment.
That's always what I've said too, so I'm now proposing to put all the "want to be murderers" together with folks who want suicide assistance. Make one move, get two results or whatever they say.
Your reply is reasonable. I've always thought the biggest problem to almost anything is human. We sometimes make the most thoughtless decisions and justify them with the flimsiest of excuses. We marvel at the stubbornness of two year-olds, then ignore ourselves.
> I've always thought the biggest problem to almost anything is human.
Makes sense, "problem" is a human invention and without humans on the planet, there wouldn't really be any problems anymore.
> "The real danger of allowing smoking on a hydrogen airship - was the risk of a fire"
Maybe. They had diesel engines, 240 Volt and 24 Volt electric generators, 200 Watt battery powered radio transmitter, backup radio transmitter, a 5.7 million candle power searchlight, an electric oven and hob galley. It's not like there were no risk of heat or combustion anywhere else on the airship.
The real danger was using hydrogen to float the airship.
No, the passengers were in a gondola off the bottom of the airship, the lift gas was concentrated at the top of the airship, some 100 feet above, above an asbestos ceiling. The real dangers were:
- being early in the days of flying. One airship disaster (the British R101) was the airship being extended, not tested carefully, and rushed into service for a political deadline. Another had the vents sealed shut so it hit its altitude ceiling. The Graf Zeppelin was one of the safest aircraft ever flown - a million miles without accident in the 1930s when aeroplanes were crashing a lot. Even the Hindenburg disaster killed 35 people, most of its passengers and crew survived.
- Using cow intestines stitched together by hand to make the Hydrogen lift cells. The stitching leaves holes which could let air mix with the lift gas.
- Many airship accidents were related to mooring, and having humans grab onto mooring lines and having humans try to pull a 7 million cubic foot balloon against the wind and that going wrong.
If we can now do high pressure Hydrogen powered cars, tanks of it in gas stations in urban areas and Hydrogen powered aircraft, and people think that can be safe, we ought to be able to achieve room temperature and pressure airship lift gas with it more safely than they could in the 1920s.
From another page on the site:
"The passenger accommodation aboard Hindenburg was contained within the hull of the airship (unlike Graf Zeppelin, whose passenger space was located in the ship’s gondola)."
https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/interiors/
Make it illegal. No rational person would through their life away just to smoke.
What if an irrational person was aboard.
Feels like this may run into a no true scotsman but this is demonstrably false if you look at the number of marijuana smokers in countries where they impose severe penalties (up to life) on them
if cigarettes can destroy the airship you got bigger problems.
I believe real problem was the lighters. Not the cigarettes. And hydrogen was not that risky. Problem was more so that the envelop was too burnable.
Is there any truth of Nicotine being a nootropic?
I'm all about non-nicotine focus pouches these days. Came acrosss a new one recently that has extended caffeine and 4-6 hrs of lock in
Link?
Maybe https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11350241/
It's a vasoconstrictor. Gets more blood up to the brain.