smoke is bad for you , as is 2nd - paw smoking . It is the leading movement of preventable death in the United States , causingmore than 480,000 demise annually . Just something we should probably get out of the way before we tell you the next bit : Before it was shun on airplanes , it may have actually saved passengers ' lives .
In 1988 , smoking was finallybanned on all planes in the US . Not everyone was glad about it – specifically smokers and airplane mechanics . While smoker were stuck with the inconvenience of not being able to light up 35,000 understructure ( 10.6 klick ) in the air , mechanism lost a way to spot potentially fatal defect in the plane . It work out that aircraft mechanics would use stains from nicotine to spot crack in the aircraft .
As the plane rise and the passenger cabin pressurise , air could escape through any tiny cracks in the aircraft . If the air being blown through the golf hole fall out to check sully chemicals such as nicotine and tar from cigarette smoke , blot would build up around the cracking . Mechanics could then see the blot and know that there was acrack in motivation of fixture .
This was n’t just a conjectural : an infamous crash once occur because mechanics miss these revealing signs . On May 25 , 2002 , China Airlines Flight 611 break off up mid - gentle wind , kill all 225 masses on board . The clangor was triggered by a ball up resort to the aircraft some 22 class earlier .
" One objet d’art of grounds of the metal weariness is contained in pictures that were taken during a routine review of the plane years before the crash . The photos show seeable brown nicotine stains around the doubler scale , " aviation historian Martin W Bowman write in his bookBoeing 747 : A History .
" This nicotine was deposit by smoke from the coffin nail of hoi polloi who were fume about seven yr before the calamity ( smoking was give up in a pressurized plane at that time ) . The doubler plate had a brown nicotine stain all the room around it that could have been detected visually by any of the engineers when they inspected the woodworking plane . The soil would have evoke that there might be a crevice stimulate by metal fatigue duty behind the doubler plate , as the nicotine slowly seep out due to pressure that built up when the plane reach its cruise altitude . "
" The stains were seemingly not noticed and no chastening was made to the doubler plate , which caused the crash to happen . "
Since the smoking ban on airplane around the world , other methods of detecting crack have been modernise . Routine inspections of old planes were introduced by the Federal Aviation Administration following a freestanding incident triggered by a fissure , which kill one flight tender .
Modern - day plane still employ optical review but also havehigh - technical school sensors at their disposalto notice any cracks , which is much more sophisticated than looking for a brown smear – and far better for the lungs of the cabin crew .
