Smoking on Airplanes; R. Smith

The issue is, should the government ban smok ing on airplanes? Or in hotels? Restaurants? Any privately owned building, even your home, as some have suggested? Specifically,does the danger war rant a Federal regulation to prohibit smoking on airplanes and thus subject an innocent citizen who unwittingly lights up to criminal prosecution? Most American homes have a closed-circuit . heating and air-conditioning system. Except for leaks around doors and windows, no outside air gets into the house. If there is a smoker in the house the passive smoke stays in the house, or at least a large percentage of it does. The same situaMr. Smith, a commercial pilot and retired FAA opera tions inspector, is a freelance writer based in Smyrna, Georgia. tion exists in many office buildings. So the air in homes and office buildings where most of us live and work is not changed on a regular basis. But the air in an airplane cabin is. The engines suck in air and a portion of this air is bled off the compressor section of the engine and sent to the cabin heating and air-conditioning system. This clean, fresh air from the outside is not contaminated by anything.

It is pumped into the cabin to pressurize the cabin, and in the process it is heated or cooled to provide a comfortable temperature in the cabin even though the outside air may be as low as seventy degrees below zero or as hot as a hundred and ten. The engines pump this air into the airplane's pres surization/heating/air-conditioning system on a continuous basis. Even though the airliner may be flying at an altitude of 35,000 feet or higher, the engines have the capacity to pump enough air into the cabin so that the atmosphere in the cabin is generally somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 feet, but never above 10,000feet. How long does it take for all of the stale air in the cabin to escape and be replaced by clean, fresh air? To answer that question, I went to the source, Boeing Airplane Company in Seattle, Washing ton. Prior to World War II, Boeing built the first pressurized airliner, the Boeing 307 "Stratoliner"; later the first pressurized bomber, the B-29;and in the 1950s America's first commercial, pressurized jet airliner, the Boeing 707.

Boeing spent hours digging in their engineer ing files to come up with definite positive data. Thus I can report that on a Boeing 727 cruising at 35,000 feet the air in the cabin is completely exchanged for new, fresh air about every two-to four minutes. That kind of massive air exchange does not occur in your home or in any office building that I know of. Did the FAA not know about the air-exchange rate on airliners when they made their no smoking regulation? Did they care? The issue boils down to this: Is a Federally regulated no smoking ban on airliners justified on the basis of the hazard of pas sive smoke, based on what we know about the rate of exchange of air on a typical modern jet airliner? The data available suggest that it is not. True, we face a danger from smoking. But we face a far greater and more long-term danger from a Federal bureaucracy that promulgates regula tions based on the presumption of government knows best. D 363 Letter to a Congressman Dear Congressman: I am writing to you to add some of my thoughts on the Federal budget beyond the answers I gave on your multiple choice survey. You will notice that I have checked the box indicating a desire to cut spending in each category listed. These responses are not given lightly; I considered each item listed before givingmy response.