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Why airplane bathrooms have ashtrays

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Re: Why airplane bathrooms have ashtrays

#121

Post by jrockway »

brc wrote: post #5

That's interesting news to me. I did wonder why smoking paraphernalia continued to appear in planes that were covered in anti-smoking insignia. I always assumed that the bathrooms, seat etc were made in large quantities, and that there are a lot of countries in the world where you can still light up in a flight, not to mention privately owned planes. I once flew on a Japan Air Lines flight back in the '90s. At that s…

The fire risk alone should immediately discount it.

In case you haven't noticed, the trash bins on airliners are designed to be air-tight so that a discarded cigarette that ignites a trash fire does not burn for long. There is essentially no fire risk, as a small fire will be immediately extinguished by one of the other 200 people on your plane with nothing else to do. Cigarettes are dangerous if you are smoking alone and fall asleep in bed. When 200 other people are within 50 feet of you, not so much.

A cancer risk, however, definitely yes.

Re: Why airplane bathrooms have ashtrays

#122

Post by chriszf »

WalterBright wrote: post #65
phamilton wrote: post #45

This reminds me of a presentation by Twitter at a conference where they discussed MTBR (Mean Time Before Recovery) instead of MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure). Instead of trying to prevent all possible failures, they focused on acceptable failure and speedy recovery. If a server takes twice as long to response to a request, mark it offline and let the automated recovery process diagnose the problem and if it's just an…

Airliners are designed to withstand failure, not to not have any failures. It's a change in perspective, and is very effective. Both the Fukishima plant and the Deep Water Horizon rig were unable to withstand single failures.

Actually, nuclear power plants are designed to withstand failure. Typically there are multiple backup plans to safeguard against failure of any one system. One comment I sometimes hear is, "They had to pump seawater in to cool things down? That's crazy! They should have had a backup plan." It turns out that nuclear plants are intentionally built near bodies of water because external cooling is a backup, should the primary cooling systems fail.

Nothing, however, is designed to withstand systematic catastrophic failure of all of your backup plans.

Re: Why airplane bathrooms have ashtrays

#123

Post by Symmetry »

mdda wrote: post #27
kgermino wrote: post #6

It seems to be down now. Here's the text if it continues to not work: I’ve been lucky enough to have the chance to fly a lot over the past year or so. Working with Stephen Foskett and the rest of the Tech Field Day crew means that I’ve been to California almost every month. That’s a lot of flying. One of the things that I’ve noticed on my flights is that they don’t want you to smoke. You actually used to be able to s…

The airlines actually save money by preventing smoking : The air in the cabins needs to be recycled less often. The flip side, though, is that air-bourne diseases are more prevalent on flights now, since the air is rebreathed more often before filtering. Source : Qi series 1 (BBC UK).

An interesting book I read a while ago on health myths had a very good debunking of that urban legend: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004YD69WM/ref=kinw_myk_ro_...

Re: Why airplane bathrooms have ashtrays

#124

Post by encoderer »

megablast wrote: post #61
ars wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets do the math then: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=785+millibars+*+876+cub... Result: Each air change costs around .62 of a gallon of gas (assuming perfect efficiency). Or around $2.50 - let's call it $10 to account for inefficiency. In contrast it costs around $10,000 per hour (not including salary) to fly a large plane. Saying they don't circulate air to save money is ridiculous.

Some airlines make just over $100 per flight. Not per person per flight, PER FLIGHT. They are looking for every saving they can get. You can work this out my looking at an an airlines profits, and how many flights they did a year.

Life is complicated. So are airlines.

In this case, airlines are a business designed not to have runaway profit. The unions are very powerful. They know how much money the airline is making a demand large percentages of it. They leave a nominal profit for key investors but shareholders as a whole are regularly left out. In fact, if you look at the entire history of commercial flight, the industry is break-even.

That's not a fluke. If costs were higher, unions would get a smaller cut. If costs were lower, unions would take more.

Philip Greenspun has some great writing on this, as well as the old, shortlived but fantastic Enplaned blog.

Re: Why airplane bathrooms have ashtrays

#125

Post by Symmetry »

You can see the same principle in a lot of places. This makes me think of a passage I recently read about the legal system in Germany:

…Unlike many developing countries, German legal doctrine and practice avoid this result. German regulatory violations seldom void contracts, and German prosecutors seldom act on regulatory violations revealed in a civil trial. Thus a gardener in the German gray market who does not pay taxes can sue an employer for unpaid wages without fear of triggering regulatory prosecution. And a customer who buys a restaurant meal at an hour when law requires the closing of restaurants still has to pay his credit card bill. The same applies for a construction contract that violates zoning regulations, or a credit contract that violates banking regulations. Although seldom discussed in constitutional law, separating the civil courts from the regulators and police is an important part of the separation of powers, especially in countries with a large gray market.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/05/sol...

Re: Why airplane bathrooms have ashtrays

#127

Post by aubergene »

jgrahamc wrote: post #108
ricardobeat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CloudFlare caches seem to always fail when they are most needed.

I decided to investigate this comment to see if we (CloudFlare) actually had failed while this story was hot. Bottom line is that the site is on CloudFlare, and during heavy load (probably from Hacker News) the site did go down or slowed a lot. Unfortunately, it's the real web server that died or went very slow and not anything in CloudFlare. The server appears to still be having problems because if I browse to other…

Isn't this exactly what "always online" it supposed to prevent?

Re: Why airplane bathrooms have ashtrays

#128

Post by WalterBright »

GoodIntentions wrote: post #102
WalterBright wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airliners are designed to withstand failure, not to not have any failures. It's a change in perspective, and is very effective. Both the Fukishima plant and the Deep Water Horizon rig were unable to withstand single failures.

>> Fukishima plant Actually it sounds like the plant failed due to some poor - in retrospect - design assumptions. The generators required to keep cooling systems running safely were buggered by the same disaster. "fail-over" - they got it half right.

The problem is when the backup system is not independent of the primary, so one failure takes out the other. When I read about the step-by-step domino sequence of failures in the plant, the design was clearly deficient.

The erroneous thinking was "the tsunami wall cannot fail". The correct thinking is "what happens when the tsunami wall is breached? what happens to the plant? how can the plant withstand that?"

For example, the most obvious thing is to harden the backup diesel generators against flooding. This would not have been difficult nor expensive. Another solution would have been to have those generators located at some distance from the plant, so they could be repaired without irradiating the workers, and so a disaster at one would be less likely to affect the other.

Another obviously poor design was to have the emergency hydrogen venting go into an enclosed space, where it can build up and explode, rather than venting it outside.

Re: Why airplane bathrooms have ashtrays

#129

Post by pavel_lishin »

afterburner wrote: post #111
pavel_lishin wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, aside from the cleaning, it's the same in America. But if a driver pulled over in the middle of rush hour traffic to kick someone off a bus because they put down an empty can of soda, they'd be torn to shreds before they made it back to the driver's seat.

"they'd be torn to shreds" Where are you taking buses that the passengers are so rage-filled?

New York City.

Re: Why airplane bathrooms have ashtrays

#130

Post by Muzza »

yxhuvud wrote: post #76
yardie wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drivers are not conductors and I doing one job is hard enough, now you think they should have 3? It's probably cheaper to have a trashcan onboard than an armed driver. Yes, when you threaten people with ejection sometimes they threaten you right back.

Huh? Drivers are gatekeepers that let people onto the bus and validate that the people that enter the bus have tickets. If people don't respect what the driver says, the driver should stop the bus, and call security and then not move until the issue is resolved. There should be no tolerance at all for people that threatens the driver.

> Huh? Drivers are gatekeepers that let people onto the bus and validate that the people that enter the bus have tickets.

There are many cities where you can enter through any of the bus' doors.

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