Smoking cigarettes in airplanes made the airplanes safer?

[CraigMichael]

By “safer” I mean in regards to the structural integrity of the airplane, not as in reducing cancer risk of the passengers or something like that.

Was at my dentist today discussing a tooth with some potential small cracks, and he got to talking about smoking cigarettes in airplanes. The story, as he told it, was that when passengers used to smoke inside airplanes, the tar from the cigarette smoke would accumulate on the inside surfaces of the fuselage and provide an extra layer of sealant. This was significant enough, he continued, that it could be observed by the amount of work necessary to maintain cabin pressure.

There may be a kind of truth to this. This is from a 1988 UPI article.

The recently imposed smoking ban on many commercial flights has had one distinctly unhealthy side effect—it snuffed out the most popular method mechanics used to spot cracks in aircraft fuselages.

Up until April when the government banned lighting up on flights of two hours duration or less, mechanics could count on tell-tale build-up of nicotine around cracks as air escaped from the passenger cabin when the plane pressurized after lift-off.

The cracks, which often are not dangerous as long as they remain small and do not link up, generally were repaired when the plane went in for maintenance.

But with the smoking ban, the nicotine is gone on many types of aircraft used in shorter flights such as DC-9s and Boeing 727s and 737s, and mechanics must now rely on much closer visual inspections and in some cases electronic inspections to detect cracks.

A blog with a more compelling version of this story with some details about an Aloha Airlines is here (they seem to have an expired SSL cert). And another with an interesting tangent involving Bertrand Russell.

Cigarettes have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be murderers, but for 26 people in 1948, they were a lifesaver. When a Norwegian domestic flight from Oslo to Hommelvik crashed due to high winds, 19 people died, but the 26 people sitting in the smoking section located at the back of the plane just happened to be in the right place to survive. Amazingly, 76-year-old philosopher Bertrand Russell was one of them. In his autobiography, he wrote that he insisted on a seat in the smoking section because “if I cannot smoke, I should die.”

I didn’t find much support for the initial claim, though it still seems plausible. But it does seem to be true that cigarettes played a role in airplane structural integrity prior to 1988.

But...

“Dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke.”—Allen Ginsberg

[cozy]

Okay, now that I have already made the mistake of accidentally clicking the subdued manila submit surrounded submit button, let’s go read the original article this is referencing as the ban.

He also wrote this. Hugh Vickery, that is. He is secretary of the interior now. So this article was April 22nd, 1988. Then, there was another article about the Aloha Airlines flight that crashed. That was written on May 11th. And finally, there is the quoted article about the recent ban on May 27th. Now, I want to specifically focus on what I pretty much presumed. I fear I go into fallacious territory, but in this timeframe, it is about as reliable as it can get in terms of manufacturing consent, the only thing more reliable I find being Enron.

Under the new rules, passengers will be prohibited from lighting up on roughly 80 percent of all domestic flights.

The controversial ban was signed into law by President Reagan last December over the tobacco industry’s objections. It will last for two years unless Congress renews it.

The ban represents the first time Congress has restricted smoking for public health reasons.

Tobacco lobbyists vow to work to repeal the law, though they will encourage smokers to obey the law.

So you can see the framing that has been missed by skipping to that article.

‘We continue to voice our opinion that this law is unwarranted, but it is in place and people need to be law-abiding,’ said Brennan Moran, a spokeswoman for the Tobacco Institute, an industry trade group.

‘The right to a smoke-free environment does not exist under the Constitution,’ she added.

And, naturally, the penultimate...

Meanwhile, other airlines are waiting to see how the public reacts to Northwest’s total ban to see whether it hurts or helps business.

Now, the second article. It makes no such mention whatsoever to any of this and in fact this is the furthest thing I could imagine coming from such a story. It’s totally reductive of the problems and whitewashes the extent of these design flaws. Can you imagine if that was true, and they had never done this investigation into the 737? It is of course, in my opinion, complete smokelighting nonsense, but it’s almost plausible. Right? Well,

The accident led the FAA to require extensive inspections of older Boeing 737s for structural weaknesses. The agency is concerned that a bonding process used to attach layers of the fuselage skin in the first 291 Boeing 737s might lead to delamination, corrosion and cracking in the fuselage joints of the aircraft.

Continued to article #3,

Those inspections have revealed a number of previously undetected cracks that, if not fixed, could lead to the kind of structural failure that occurred in the Aloha accident, the agency said earlier this week.

How long were they undetected? Did they not, say, report this overwhelming amount of structural flaws? I was in the Air Force and all and I understand the concept of rubber bands and gum for repairs and flew on such planes often, but we were active duty. We were not customers and passengers. It sounds like basic neglect to me.

Ah, and, so it says just a couple lines later,

Airlines could avoid conducting the expensive inspections by installing additional fasteners on fuselage joints to ensure against structural failures.

Cost cutting measures!

It ends on a note that, frankly, is very declarative and something that sort of gets into your psyche. Eventually you mention it at parties and to slightly tipsy friends. And so on and so forth. Such tactics are and were common among industries with that much literal gaslighting power.

‘The easiest and most common way to detect leaks in the fuselage today is to look for tobacco smoke stains on the outside metal,’ Lewis told his colleageus in introducing the bill. ‘Not very reassuring, is it?’

Did you ever wonder why thorium gets such a bad rap lately? I did, so I looked up the authors and funding sources of the papers- not even academic ones I was being given by people, mind you- just random ones they happened to find first- and you can guess who wrote them. What is sad to me to a degree is this isn’t even a conspiracy, really. It’s literally out in the open and waving their arms back and forth and then saying oopsie sowwie everyone we didn’t mean to do it we just thought your kids would love the refreshing taste of Marlboro golds :(.

I do not think Hugh Vickery himself was actually party to any of this, but I do think this is a great example of manufactured content; it’s weaponized mere exposure. Your patsies do not even need to be in on it. You just have to give them a plausibly true story to publish.

New hypothesis: dentists are the best misinformation spreaders of professional careers.

Further reading, howerver, much more stilted into narrative-land and necessarily should be scrutinized to the same degree.

The Tobacco Institute spread misinfo before that

The Tobacco Institute was specifically prepared to deal with this ban and to ensure it was sunset

R. William Murray, or Bill Murray, but not that Bill Murray, and not the other other one, was a lobbying strategist and PR head

Boca Raton Plan started literally that year.

I find it very interesting when things just, line up. Like a song. Perhaps merely confirmation bias.

The $2 billion spent yearly on cigarette advertising and promotion is aimed at getting existing smokers to switch brands, said Charles Whitley, a consultant to the the Tobacco Institute.

‘Cigarette advertising does not cause smoking any more than soap advertising causes people to bathe,’ Whitley said in a statement.

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