Smoking on Planes

Just after the fall of communism my job was to lead workers in 21 countries from Norway in the north to Greece in the south. This area included many of the former Soviet satellite countries. We operated from an office in Wiesbaden, Germany, very near the Frankfurt Airport.

This was an exciting time to work in eastern Europe as the people in these countries were introduced to many new freedoms, and many government restrictions had disappeared. However, their economies were in shambles as they moved from a communist system that replaced private property and profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of many industries and natural resources.

People often asked me if I learned German while living in Germany, but frankly, with traveling to these 21 countries to help new workers get settled in and oriented to language study, I was not in my home in Germany enough to learn German. Each one of these 21 countries had their own language.

They also asked how many frequent flier miles I accumulated during this time since I was traveling so much. My response was that after 3 years of doing this work in eastern Europe, I had not gained enough miles to earn one free trip.

If I had been able to fly Lufthansa to every country, I would have accumulated a lot of miles. However, each country to which I was traveling had their own airline, and these airlines were always less expensive than Lufthansa. So, if I was flying to Warsaw, I would fly on LOT. To Bucharest, TAROM. To Prague, CZECH Airlines, and so on.

Occasionally I flew Lufthansa, but this was during the early days of the European airlines enforcement of providing non-smoking seats for passengers. Lufthansa’s interpretation of providing non-smoking seats went like this. In the Business Class, there were two rows of non-smoking seats followed by several rows of smoking seats. Then there were two more rows of non-smoking seats followed by rows of smoking seats for the rest of the plane. As you can imagine it was impossible to escape the smoke.

I had been working in Belgrade and was aboard a Yugoslavian Airlines flight. It was a prop plane with two seats on either side of the aisle. It was an old Soviet-made plane with thin seat cushions, and the floor under the seats was just the metal of the superstructure of the plane. I was in an aisle seat, and the guy directly across from me in the aisle seat (like 20 inches from me) lit up a cigarette. I looked at my paper boarding pass to confirm that I had requested a non-smoking seat. Yes.

There were no buttons to push for any service, so I started waving my hands in the air at the flight attendant who was sitting in the back of the plane—yes, she was also smoking. She meandered up the aisle to my seat and asked me in broken English, “May I help you?” I asked her to look at my boarding card indicating that I had a non-smoking seat. She replied, “Yes.” Then I said to her, “The man next to me is smoking.” She said, “Yes.”

At this point I was wondering if she was understanding me, so again I showed her my boarding card. Non-smoking. She said, “Oh yes.” She pointed to my side of the plane and said, “This side no smoke.” And then she pointed across the aisle and said, “This side smoke.”

These experiences plus many others in the former Soviet Union, the Arab world and Asia have caused me to inhale enough smoke to do serious damage to my lungs. Maybe that’s why I had to have my middle lobe removed a few years ago!