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Why airplane bathrooms have ashtrays

475 points by MPSimmons 14y ago

darksim905 14y ago
Nice writeup :D
- _kst_ 14y ago
  I'm sure it was, but now it says "This website is offline. No cached version is available"
  - mrud 14y ago
    Try the google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.standalone-sysadmin.com%2Fblog%2F2012%2F05%2Fengineeringinfrastructures%2F&oq=&aq=&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=777765211aff8a58&biw=1596&bih=789&ion=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&outpu...
    - calinet6 14y ago
      Or this gist I made while I had the page up: https://gist.github.com/2766143 https://gist.github.com/2766143
ojbyrne 14y ago
Perhaps also because there are still airlines in the world (almost entirely in the Middle East and Africa) that still allow smoking.
- ComputerGuru 14y ago
  I don't know about the Middle East. I've flown on just about all the Middle Eastern airlines over the past 7 years, I don't think I've seen a single one that permitted smoking.
- superuser2 14y ago
  Anecdotal evidence (the best kind!) - yes. A friend who went to the National Security Language Institute in Yemen last summer recalled several smoke-filled regional/commuter flights.
brc 14y ago
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 stage they still had the back 6 rows or something as smoking seats. The girl who assigned my seat at check in didn't realise this and allocated me there. I just sat there and took it for 8 hours - nowadays I would have loudly demanded an upgrade out of there - but I was somewhat meek in accepting my fate. The lady next to me had just been to bury a relative in a car crash and was on the way back home. She must have drank half a bottle of whisky and smoked two packets of cigarettes. When I arrived I smelt like a tobacco spitoon and felt as though I had sand rubbed in my eyes. Allowing smoking on planes was and is a terrible idea. The fire risk alone should immediately discount it.
- Turing_Machine 14y ago
  "The fire risk alone should immediately discount it." A quick Google turns up only two airline accidents possibly attributed to cigarettes (a 1982 Illyshin IL-18 crash in Guangzhou, China and a 1973 crash in France). Pretty minimal, given that smoking was allowed on millions of flights for close to 90 years.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    We fly a lot more now than before deregulation, while many countries are just emerging with people who commonly commute via planes. I wouldn't be surprised if passenger miles from 1990 to 2010 were larger than 1900 to 1990. Flying used to be a high-class affair, now anyone can fly; not allowing smoking is probably a good thing in that context. At least, here in China, people are not careful in the way they smoke, and I wouldn't get on a plane that allowed smoking. Ever see a Starbucks trashcan go up in smoke after someone was told they couldn't smoke there? Its quite funny the first couple of times, but it gets old after that.
  - brc 14y ago
    That's two more crashes than is necessary if you ask me. You're not allowed to take firecrackers on a plane, and there probably isn't any recorded crashes from firecrackers. Besides, you don't need to crash a plane to make it a bad idea. Just damaging it or creating a smoke filled (as in burning material, not cigarettes) interior is bad enough. I can see how you might think it's OK if you're a smoker, but I'm happy that there isn't any smoking.
kgermino 14y ago
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 smoke on planes, which seems weird now that you can’t even smoke outide. I’m not a smoker, so it doesn’t bother me. (As an adorable aside, when I was five years old, I literally glued hand-made no-smoking signs to the walls of my grandparents’ house. They were less than amused.) But the occasional legacy arm-rest with an ashtray harkens back to days of yore when every Joe Cool enjoyed the wonders of aviation while kicking back with a flights as smooth as a Laramie cigarette. He probably got a full meal as part of his ticket, too, the jerk. Then the bleeding-heart liberals attacked in 1988, complaining of their “filthy air” and their “lung cancer”. The FAA banned smoking on flights less than 2 hours, presumably because the pilots were getting nic-fits after longer than that. This was, of course, the thin end of the wedge. In 2000, the FAA banned smoking on commercial planes altogether. Talk about a bunch of buzz-kills. So now we’re flying without cigarettes, and they are not kidding around about this whole “no smoking” thing…all you have to do is open your eyes to see that they don’t want you smoking: That light is never turned off. I have actually seen a few planes which were new enough that instead of a no-smoking sign say “Please turn off electronic devices”, under the assumption that everyone is already well-trained enough to not smoke, but those are comparatively rare. Nope, it’s mostly the “no smoking signs”. But in case you didn’t look up, here’s the safety information sheet on the airplane. See if you can count the number of “No Smoking” warnings: And on top of this, there’s a smoke detector in the bathroom (along with a heavy fine for disabling the smoke detector, too!) No, planes are pretty much set up for not-smoking. Heck, there’s even a “No Smoking” sign on the ashtray in the bathroom: Wait, what? Yes, you read me right. You’ve probably even seen them yourself. In airplane bathrooms, there is an ashtray (complete with No Smoking sticker) for the people who smoke in the bathroom, even though they shouldn’t. When I first started bringing this up to people, I encountered the same reaction again and again. People would say, “oh, it just costs too much to replace the door or take out the ashtray”. This is absolutely not the reason, though. Allow me to quote from the Code of Federal Regulations for airworthiness: Regardless of whether smoking is allowed in any other part of the airplane, lavatories must have self-contained, removable ashtrays located conspicuously on or near the entry side of each lavatory door, except that one ashtray may serve more than one lavatory door if the ashtray can be seen readily from the cabin side of each lavatory served. The plane can not leave the terminal if the bathrooms don’t have ashtrays. They’re non-optional. That’s an awfully strange stance to take for a vehicle with such a stringent “no smoking” policy, but it really does make a lot of sense. Back in 1973, a flight crashed and killed 123 people, and the reason for the crash was attributed to a cigarette that was improperly disposed of. The FAA has decided that some people (despite the policies against smoking, the warning placards, the smoke detector, and the flight attendants) will smoke anyway, and when they do, there had better be a good place to put that cigarette butt. There’s a lot of wisdom in a decision like that. I think that it’s a lesson that we can put to use in a lot of the things that we do. There’s a really interesting book on a similar topic, called Nudge.. The idea behind Nudge is that every design decision that you make, as an engineer, affects the way that people behave toward your creation, so you should tend toward design decisions that encourage positive behavior in users. This is similar to the design consideration called affordance. If you’ve ever walked up to a door and pushed, then realized that the door was supposed to be pulled, even though it looked like it should have been pushed, then you’ve come up against someone who didn’t understand affordance. Here’s a good image of handles which afford pushing or pulling by Yanko Design: It’s a cross between form and function. We have “grippy” hands that open flat. We instinctively know how to use things like this because of how we are formed. You don’t engineer your systems with the belief that none of your computers will ever break. That’s insane; you KNOW they’re going to break. So don’t assume that your users will never break the rules. Build in graceful failure as often as possible, whether you’re designing a user interface or a security policy. Likewise, when you are designing your infrastructure (or security policies), keep in mind the idea of affordance, and nudge people into making the “right” decision each time. The cynical Hanlon’s Razor says Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be ascribed to stupidity Instead of stupidity, maybe people are trying to push on the door that’s supposed to be pulled.
deleted 14y ago
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ww520 14y ago
Very good observation. I've never paid attention to the ashtray in the airplane bathrooms and thought they were relic from the plane design in the old days.
- bediger4000 14y ago
  I thought they were a relic not of plane design, but from "flight certification" of the lavatories or the doors. The FAA and the major US plane companies (of which only Boeing is left) made a huge process of flight certifying every little trinket and gewgaw. Once certified, the technology on a plane was essentially frozen, as it was too expensive to certify anything else. I give you the seatbelts and their pressed-steel 50s-style buckles as another example. They look like something Dr Benton Quest developed just after he graduated from college on the GI Bill.
nicholaides 14y ago
I was thinking about this same idea earlier today: Buses in Philadelphia have a bunch of "No Eating and Drinking" signs and consequently no trash cans. The result is that the back of the bus is covered in trash. If they had just 1 or two trash cans it would be a much more pleasant ride.
- Drbble 14y ago
  I have never seen a city bus with a trash can.
  - there 14y ago
    Chicago's CTA busses have garbage cans in front of the rear exit doors. But then again we also have alleys so we don't have to put our garbage out on the sidewalks.
  - anghyflawn 14y ago
    We have them in Norway
  - alexro 14y ago
    In London too
- yxhuvud 14y ago
  The solution to that is to make the driver responsible for cleaning his bus, and also to give him the right to eject people that doesn't follow the rules.
  - asparagui 14y ago
    ...and then when the driver of $ethnicityA kicks off a passenger of $ethnicityB, there's a lawsuit and we're back to square one.
  - borism 14y ago
    wow, seriously? are you by chance a congressman or lawmaker of some sorts?
calinet6 14y ago
This was always awesome to me. I knew it perfectly from the moment I saw the ashtrays that it was a conscious and genius decision for the human-centered system of an airplane. This has business implications more than UI implications, I think. We don't question airlines when it comes to safety regulations, pilot time off, good amounts of rest, all that. We regulate everything liberally. Air travel is a system designed like clockwork for every single variable and every single complex input. And it works nearly flawlessly. Yet, in business—even in the best businesses—we expect far more of individual people than they are capable of, instead of improving the systems they're in. You have to control for both, and design for the realities of business and work; even the human ones. Don't believe in myths, don't depend on rockstars, and prepare for anything. Improve your systems as if it was as important as air travel. Your employees are great, but put ashtrays in the bathrooms so they don't set the plane on fire. So to speak. For those interested in systems thinking and especially how it relates to people and business, look up W. Edwards Deming and read at least his 14 points. Read "Out of the Crisis" for more. Personally I think systems thinking needs to be more prevalent in business today, but we're still a very individualist society so it's very difficult to make the leap. Something to consider as well.
asmithmd1 14y ago
If an errant cigarette is enough to bring down a plane why does the TSA strip search me looking for a bomb? I bet you could get a pretty roaring fire going using the 120v outlet and all the paper goods provided in the bathroom.
- mikeash 14y ago
  Because, although it could bring down a plane, it's very likely not to. The fire will be detected quickly and then put out. Your question is sort of like asking, if an airliner can fly on one engine, why do they bother putting on two? The answer, quite simply, is robustness.
  - asmithmd1 14y ago
    My point is that it is very unlikely anyone will try. There is exactly nothing stopping anyone from packing an airplane bathroom with alcohol soaked paper towels and lighting it on fire; and yet it has not ever happened. The TSA is a colossal waste of time and money - the more ways that it can be pointed out the better.
    - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
      I don't like the TSA's approach either, but this isn't a very good argument. They stopped disallowing lighters on flights for this reason; they don't want to care about the small threats and focus on finding...you know...terrorists. The change hasn't soaked in completely yet, but their is hope they'll do the right thing eventually. It would be fairly easy to put your fire out with a fire extinguisher. But I'd rather not fly with you anyways :)
      - raldi 14y ago
        Aren't matches still allowed?
        bdunbar 14y ago
mikeash 14y ago
This is an important lesson. Programmers are constantly blaming users for this and that. Yes, it can make sense for stuff that's rare, but building your apps around the idea that users are rational human beings who read error messages and instructions makes no more sense than building your apps around the idea that computers have unlimited processing power and storage space. 99% of the time, "that was the user's fault" just doesn't cut it. You need to be design around the user's flaws just as you need to design around the computer's flaws, the network's flaws, the OS's flaws....
adviceonly 14y ago
Site is down. A conspiracy by the TSA to bring down those that would thwart security, no doubt. ;)
dantiberian 14y ago
Here's a link to the book site and Amazon page: http://nudges.org/ http://nudges.org/ http://www.amazon.com/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happiness/dp/0300122233 http://www.amazon.com/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happi...
dzhiurgis 14y ago
So in that case, we should put ashtrays in libraries, gas stations and everywhere, so we prevent fire?
- djeikyb 14y ago
  Where I've lived, there are ash trays everywhere, not despite; because of laws prohibiting smoking in these areas. The idea is to provide a safe and convenient place to dispose of your cigarette now that you've entered a non-smoking area.
- stephen_g 14y ago
  Fires on planes are a little more serious. If not stopped quickly, they can spread through the space between the fuselage and the cabin, filling it with smoke. At altitude, they don't have enough oxygen to burn that well, but if it's spread far enough, as soon as you're on the ground the inrush of oxygen will turn it into an inferno in about two minutes (this is why manufacturers have to be able to show that the plane can be entirely evacuated on something like 90 seconds with half the exits blocked.)
- dzhiurgis 14y ago
  Ok, it makes sense now :)
georgieporgie 14y ago
Alternative idea: allow the flight attendants to hand out nicotine patches. :-)
- cjrp 14y ago
  Ryanair sell "e-cigarettes" on their flights.
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    I've heard of flights saying they're not allowed for various reasons, encouraging people without them to have a normal cigarette being the most unsurprising.
vinodkd 14y ago
nice message with the real reason for the ashtrays. one thing that bothered me however, was that push vs pull handle design. if you're really trying to provide affordance, why have a handle at all on a door that needs to be pushed? isnt it our natural tendency to pull on a door handle when provided with one? all we'd need was a "Push" sign and we'd be done. The shape of the handle hinting how to use it seems subtler than providing the whole door surface as actionable; and if you had to unlock to open, we have well established pushable door designs already.
- vacri 14y ago
  People frequently don't read signs, which is the point of the affordance design (plus caters to folks who can't read the given language). Also, hands make stuff dirty - you do want something there that's easy to clean, though that can just be a metal plate that can't be pulled.
  - vinodkd 14y ago
    but you could take the sign away and imo people would still open the door - simply because that seems to be the only thing they could do. plus with the whole door surface being available, why would you use just your hands? use your shoulder or even back (if you happen to be carrying stuff in both hands)! seems to me like that would be more affordance.
phamilton 14y ago
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 anomaly mark it back online. It was pretty interesting and we took a good look at our architecture and found ways to better cater to acceptable failures.
- there 14y ago
  Audi's strategy in the early 2000s for winning Le Mans 12- and 24-hour endurance races against Bentley was to engineer their cars around failure. The Bentley cars were faster, but Audi engineered theirs to be easier to fix. Over such long races, there were bound to be crashes or failures of various parts and the faster Audi could fix their cars, the quicker they could get back out on the track to outlast the faster cars. A great example of this was that Bentley used the lightest bolt they could everywhere on the car to minimize weight, but Audi used the same size bolt everywhere to minimize the number of tool changes needed to replace the parts.
- WalterBright 14y ago
  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.
  - Mvandenbergh 14y ago
    Nuclear power plants and oil rigs are also designed to withstand failure.
  - GoodIntentions 14y ago
    >> 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.
mjg59 14y ago
http://www.marco.org/2012/02/25/right-vs-pragmatic http://www.marco.org/2012/02/25/right-vs-pragmatic is a similar example. It's important to cater for what people are going to do rather than what you think they should do.
stevenwei 14y ago
Then the bleeding-heart liberals attacked in 1988, complaining about their “filthy air” and their “lung cancer”. This was, of course, the thin end of the wedge. In 2000, the FAA banned smoking on commercial planes altogether. Talk about a bunch of buzz-kills. Really? Does anyone actually think this was a bad idea? Forget the "filthy air" or "lung cancer", exposure to smoke can seriously aggravate asthmatics and other folks with respiratory conditions, not to mention cause respiratory conditions in children. Surely smokers can abstain for a few hours instead of exposing everyone in a confined space to their cigarette smoke. I'm at a loss as to why anyone would complain about this.
- there 14y ago
  I took it to be sarcasm. Anyone that puts "lung cancer" in scarequotes has to be joking.
- derleth 14y ago
  And Poe's Law strikes again. On the other hand, yeah, there are people who honestly think that those regulations are a bad idea that bring us farther down the Road to Serfdom and the ultimate death of Western Culture.
  - pavel_lishin 14y ago
    I always forget the name of Poe's Law, thank you.
- MPSimmons 14y ago
  I assure you, it was sarcasm.
snowwrestler 14y ago
The illustration of the door handle is a great example of piss-poor affordance. A slight ridge is not going to clearly communicate push vs. pull. Especially since our fingers, when gripping, actually like a ridge to fill in the open angle behind the first knuckles. If you want someone to push, give them a big fat flat metal plate or bar to push on. If they can't pull, they are guaranteed to get it right every time. I bet pretty much every restaurant kitchen and high school gym door in the U.S. gets this right.
- jasonkester 14y ago
  The door handle could actually be described as an anti-affordance. I looked at the photo and thought to myself what a great idea it was that it gave you a comfortable ridge for your knuckles while pulling and a nice rounded bit (instead of a sharp-edged flat surface) to push on. That is, it signalled to me the exact opposite of the designer's intended use. I would have been doubly surprised if pulling on that clearly "pull-only" handle didn't open the door.
  - astrodust 14y ago
    Why not have a handle that's either concave or convex, bowing in or out, to indicate the desired direction? If it's shaped like a hook, you'll pull on it, or more like a dish, push on it.
  - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    Me too. Did the blogger just label it wrongly?
- duaneb 14y ago
  I would have tried to rotate both of those handles. You want to know a great user interface that is universally understood? PUSH: http://www.vanseodesign.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/door-push-bar.jpg http://www.vanseodesign.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/... PULL: http://www.artfactory.com/images/Door-Handle-HH199.jpg http://www.artfactory.com/images/Door-Handle-HH199.jpg The door handle sacrifices usability for aesthetics.
fabjan 14y ago
And Sweden.
joshuaheard 14y ago
I think the author gives the federal government too much credit. Which is more likely: the government out-witted people by thinking ahead and foreseeing people would break the law, so they write a law to counter it; or, they left the law on the books from when smoking was legal and never amended it? I think the latter.
- Mvandenbergh 14y ago
  The "federal government" as in the the FAA knows quite a bit about regulating airline safety. The probability that the FAA left a regulation in there because they just forgot to change it is pretty much 0.
  - falcolas 14y ago
    I think you give them too much credit. When I was training to be a pilot some 10 years ago, I remember asking why a lot of regs were in the books. The answer was usually a shrug, or some anecdote about a corner case from the pioneer days of flying.
sparknlaunch12 14y ago
Not really surprised by smokers not being deterred by multiple warnings not to smoke on planes. Airlines rightly install ash trays to avoid smokers throwing cigarettes into the wrong place creating a real fire hazard. Remember being on a long haul flight and passenger next to me would disappear to the lavatory clearly sneaking a smoke. He also snuck off to sleep in first class. We have rules in place for the minority of society who lack common sense.
alexro 14y ago
First of all: why airplane toilets called bathrooms?
- feintruled 14y ago
  Delicate sensibilities. What is that phrase, civilization can be measured by how far we remove ourselves from our sewage? We're so darn civilized now we can't even indirectly refer to shit in polite company.
- afterburner 14y ago
  It's not the airplane; those facilities are simply called by different names in different parts of the English speaking world. Toilet, restroom, bathroom, WC, etc.
- eru 14y ago
  By the way, toilet is just another euphemism.
noonespecial 14y ago
Any time you find what you think is an irrational rule in aviation, you can usually trace it back to someone dying.
CoffeeAndCoffee 14y ago
I can't imagine being stuck in a floating smoke pit. The airlines would have to pay me to fly.
Symmetry 14y ago
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/solomons-knot-and-gray-markets.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/05/sol...
- rprasad 14y ago
  That's generally true of most first world countries, including the US and the UK. Contracts can be broken if they would require an illegal act (i.e., a "crime"), but regulatory infractions generally are not sufficient.
thereason 14y ago
I thought "and their "lung cancer"" was the best part. The fact that some on HN cannot detect the sense of humor is a little scary.

475 points by MPSimmons 14y ago

darksim905 14y ago

Nice writeup :D

_kst_ 14y ago
I'm sure it was, but now it says "This website is offline. No cached version is available"
- mrud 14y ago
  Try the google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.standalone-sysadmin.com%2Fblog%2F2012%2F05%2Fengineeringinfrastructures%2F&oq=&aq=&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=777765211aff8a58&biw=1596&bih=789&ion=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&outpu...
  - calinet6 14y ago
    Or this gist I made while I had the page up: https://gist.github.com/2766143 https://gist.github.com/2766143

ojbyrne 14y ago

Perhaps also because there are still airlines in the world (almost entirely in the Middle East and Africa) that still allow smoking.

ComputerGuru 14y ago
I don't know about the Middle East. I've flown on just about all the Middle Eastern airlines over the past 7 years, I don't think I've seen a single one that permitted smoking.
superuser2 14y ago
Anecdotal evidence (the best kind!) - yes. A friend who went to the National Security Language Institute in Yemen last summer recalled several smoke-filled regional/commuter flights.

brc 14y ago

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 stage they still had the back 6 rows or something as smoking seats. The girl who assigned my seat at check in didn't realise this and allocated me there. I just sat there and took it for 8 hours - nowadays I would have loudly demanded an upgrade out of there - but I was somewhat meek in accepting my fate. The lady next to me had just been to bury a relative in a car crash and was on the way back home. She must have drank half a bottle of whisky and smoked two packets of cigarettes. When I arrived I smelt like a tobacco spitoon and felt as though I had sand rubbed in my eyes. Allowing smoking on planes was and is a terrible idea. The fire risk alone should immediately discount it.

Turing_Machine 14y ago
"The fire risk alone should immediately discount it." A quick Google turns up only two airline accidents possibly attributed to cigarettes (a 1982 Illyshin IL-18 crash in Guangzhou, China and a 1973 crash in France). Pretty minimal, given that smoking was allowed on millions of flights for close to 90 years.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  We fly a lot more now than before deregulation, while many countries are just emerging with people who commonly commute via planes. I wouldn't be surprised if passenger miles from 1990 to 2010 were larger than 1900 to 1990. Flying used to be a high-class affair, now anyone can fly; not allowing smoking is probably a good thing in that context. At least, here in China, people are not careful in the way they smoke, and I wouldn't get on a plane that allowed smoking. Ever see a Starbucks trashcan go up in smoke after someone was told they couldn't smoke there? Its quite funny the first couple of times, but it gets old after that.
- brc 14y ago
  That's two more crashes than is necessary if you ask me. You're not allowed to take firecrackers on a plane, and there probably isn't any recorded crashes from firecrackers. Besides, you don't need to crash a plane to make it a bad idea. Just damaging it or creating a smoke filled (as in burning material, not cigarettes) interior is bad enough. I can see how you might think it's OK if you're a smoker, but I'm happy that there isn't any smoking.

kgermino 14y ago

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 smoke on planes, which seems weird now that you can’t even smoke outide. I’m not a smoker, so it doesn’t bother me. (As an adorable aside, when I was five years old, I literally glued hand-made no-smoking signs to the walls of my grandparents’ house. They were less than amused.) But the occasional legacy arm-rest with an ashtray harkens back to days of yore when every Joe Cool enjoyed the wonders of aviation while kicking back with a flights as smooth as a Laramie cigarette. He probably got a full meal as part of his ticket, too, the jerk. Then the bleeding-heart liberals attacked in 1988, complaining of their “filthy air” and their “lung cancer”. The FAA banned smoking on flights less than 2 hours, presumably because the pilots were getting nic-fits after longer than that. This was, of course, the thin end of the wedge. In 2000, the FAA banned smoking on commercial planes altogether. Talk about a bunch of buzz-kills. So now we’re flying without cigarettes, and they are not kidding around about this whole “no smoking” thing…all you have to do is open your eyes to see that they don’t want you smoking: That light is never turned off. I have actually seen a few planes which were new enough that instead of a no-smoking sign say “Please turn off electronic devices”, under the assumption that everyone is already well-trained enough to not smoke, but those are comparatively rare. Nope, it’s mostly the “no smoking signs”. But in case you didn’t look up, here’s the safety information sheet on the airplane. See if you can count the number of “No Smoking” warnings: And on top of this, there’s a smoke detector in the bathroom (along with a heavy fine for disabling the smoke detector, too!) No, planes are pretty much set up for not-smoking. Heck, there’s even a “No Smoking” sign on the ashtray in the bathroom: Wait, what? Yes, you read me right. You’ve probably even seen them yourself. In airplane bathrooms, there is an ashtray (complete with No Smoking sticker) for the people who smoke in the bathroom, even though they shouldn’t. When I first started bringing this up to people, I encountered the same reaction again and again. People would say, “oh, it just costs too much to replace the door or take out the ashtray”. This is absolutely not the reason, though. Allow me to quote from the Code of Federal Regulations for airworthiness: Regardless of whether smoking is allowed in any other part of the airplane, lavatories must have self-contained, removable ashtrays located conspicuously on or near the entry side of each lavatory door, except that one ashtray may serve more than one lavatory door if the ashtray can be seen readily from the cabin side of each lavatory served. The plane can not leave the terminal if the bathrooms don’t have ashtrays. They’re non-optional. That’s an awfully strange stance to take for a vehicle with such a stringent “no smoking” policy, but it really does make a lot of sense. Back in 1973, a flight crashed and killed 123 people, and the reason for the crash was attributed to a cigarette that was improperly disposed of. The FAA has decided that some people (despite the policies against smoking, the warning placards, the smoke detector, and the flight attendants) will smoke anyway, and when they do, there had better be a good place to put that cigarette butt. There’s a lot of wisdom in a decision like that. I think that it’s a lesson that we can put to use in a lot of the things that we do. There’s a really interesting book on a similar topic, called Nudge.. The idea behind Nudge is that every design decision that you make, as an engineer, affects the way that people behave toward your creation, so you should tend toward design decisions that encourage positive behavior in users. This is similar to the design consideration called affordance. If you’ve ever walked up to a door and pushed, then realized that the door was supposed to be pulled, even though it looked like it should have been pushed, then you’ve come up against someone who didn’t understand affordance. Here’s a good image of handles which afford pushing or pulling by Yanko Design: It’s a cross between form and function. We have “grippy” hands that open flat. We instinctively know how to use things like this because of how we are formed. You don’t engineer your systems with the belief that none of your computers will ever break. That’s insane; you KNOW they’re going to break. So don’t assume that your users will never break the rules. Build in graceful failure as often as possible, whether you’re designing a user interface or a security policy. Likewise, when you are designing your infrastructure (or security policies), keep in mind the idea of affordance, and nudge people into making the “right” decision each time. The cynical Hanlon’s Razor says Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be ascribed to stupidity Instead of stupidity, maybe people are trying to push on the door that’s supposed to be pulled.

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ww520 14y ago

Very good observation. I've never paid attention to the ashtray in the airplane bathrooms and thought they were relic from the plane design in the old days.

bediger4000 14y ago
I thought they were a relic not of plane design, but from "flight certification" of the lavatories or the doors. The FAA and the major US plane companies (of which only Boeing is left) made a huge process of flight certifying every little trinket and gewgaw. Once certified, the technology on a plane was essentially frozen, as it was too expensive to certify anything else. I give you the seatbelts and their pressed-steel 50s-style buckles as another example. They look like something Dr Benton Quest developed just after he graduated from college on the GI Bill.

nicholaides 14y ago

I was thinking about this same idea earlier today: Buses in Philadelphia have a bunch of "No Eating and Drinking" signs and consequently no trash cans. The result is that the back of the bus is covered in trash. If they had just 1 or two trash cans it would be a much more pleasant ride.

Drbble 14y ago
I have never seen a city bus with a trash can.
- there 14y ago
  Chicago's CTA busses have garbage cans in front of the rear exit doors. But then again we also have alleys so we don't have to put our garbage out on the sidewalks.
- anghyflawn 14y ago
  We have them in Norway
- alexro 14y ago
  In London too
yxhuvud 14y ago
The solution to that is to make the driver responsible for cleaning his bus, and also to give him the right to eject people that doesn't follow the rules.
- asparagui 14y ago
  ...and then when the driver of $ethnicityA kicks off a passenger of $ethnicityB, there's a lawsuit and we're back to square one.
- borism 14y ago
  wow, seriously? are you by chance a congressman or lawmaker of some sorts?

calinet6 14y ago

This was always awesome to me. I knew it perfectly from the moment I saw the ashtrays that it was a conscious and genius decision for the human-centered system of an airplane. This has business implications more than UI implications, I think. We don't question airlines when it comes to safety regulations, pilot time off, good amounts of rest, all that. We regulate everything liberally. Air travel is a system designed like clockwork for every single variable and every single complex input. And it works nearly flawlessly. Yet, in business—even in the best businesses—we expect far more of individual people than they are capable of, instead of improving the systems they're in. You have to control for both, and design for the realities of business and work; even the human ones. Don't believe in myths, don't depend on rockstars, and prepare for anything. Improve your systems as if it was as important as air travel. Your employees are great, but put ashtrays in the bathrooms so they don't set the plane on fire. So to speak. For those interested in systems thinking and especially how it relates to people and business, look up W. Edwards Deming and read at least his 14 points. Read "Out of the Crisis" for more. Personally I think systems thinking needs to be more prevalent in business today, but we're still a very individualist society so it's very difficult to make the leap. Something to consider as well.

asmithmd1 14y ago

If an errant cigarette is enough to bring down a plane why does the TSA strip search me looking for a bomb? I bet you could get a pretty roaring fire going using the 120v outlet and all the paper goods provided in the bathroom.

mikeash 14y ago
Because, although it could bring down a plane, it's very likely not to. The fire will be detected quickly and then put out. Your question is sort of like asking, if an airliner can fly on one engine, why do they bother putting on two? The answer, quite simply, is robustness.
- asmithmd1 14y ago
  My point is that it is very unlikely anyone will try. There is exactly nothing stopping anyone from packing an airplane bathroom with alcohol soaked paper towels and lighting it on fire; and yet it has not ever happened. The TSA is a colossal waste of time and money - the more ways that it can be pointed out the better.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    I don't like the TSA's approach either, but this isn't a very good argument. They stopped disallowing lighters on flights for this reason; they don't want to care about the small threats and focus on finding...you know...terrorists. The change hasn't soaked in completely yet, but their is hope they'll do the right thing eventually. It would be fairly easy to put your fire out with a fire extinguisher. But I'd rather not fly with you anyways :)
    - raldi 14y ago
      Aren't matches still allowed?
      - bdunbar 14y ago

mikeash 14y ago

This is an important lesson. Programmers are constantly blaming users for this and that. Yes, it can make sense for stuff that's rare, but building your apps around the idea that users are rational human beings who read error messages and instructions makes no more sense than building your apps around the idea that computers have unlimited processing power and storage space. 99% of the time, "that was the user's fault" just doesn't cut it. You need to be design around the user's flaws just as you need to design around the computer's flaws, the network's flaws, the OS's flaws....

adviceonly 14y ago

Site is down. A conspiracy by the TSA to bring down those that would thwart security, no doubt. ;)

dantiberian 14y ago

Here's a link to the book site and Amazon page: http://nudges.org/ http://nudges.org/ http://www.amazon.com/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happiness/dp/0300122233 http://www.amazon.com/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happi...

dzhiurgis 14y ago

So in that case, we should put ashtrays in libraries, gas stations and everywhere, so we prevent fire?

djeikyb 14y ago
Where I've lived, there are ash trays everywhere, not despite; because of laws prohibiting smoking in these areas. The idea is to provide a safe and convenient place to dispose of your cigarette now that you've entered a non-smoking area.
stephen_g 14y ago
Fires on planes are a little more serious. If not stopped quickly, they can spread through the space between the fuselage and the cabin, filling it with smoke. At altitude, they don't have enough oxygen to burn that well, but if it's spread far enough, as soon as you're on the ground the inrush of oxygen will turn it into an inferno in about two minutes (this is why manufacturers have to be able to show that the plane can be entirely evacuated on something like 90 seconds with half the exits blocked.)
dzhiurgis 14y ago
Ok, it makes sense now :)

georgieporgie 14y ago

Alternative idea: allow the flight attendants to hand out nicotine patches. :-)

cjrp 14y ago
Ryanair sell "e-cigarettes" on their flights.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  I've heard of flights saying they're not allowed for various reasons, encouraging people without them to have a normal cigarette being the most unsurprising.

vinodkd 14y ago

nice message with the real reason for the ashtrays. one thing that bothered me however, was that push vs pull handle design. if you're really trying to provide affordance, why have a handle at all on a door that needs to be pushed? isnt it our natural tendency to pull on a door handle when provided with one? all we'd need was a "Push" sign and we'd be done. The shape of the handle hinting how to use it seems subtler than providing the whole door surface as actionable; and if you had to unlock to open, we have well established pushable door designs already.

vacri 14y ago
People frequently don't read signs, which is the point of the affordance design (plus caters to folks who can't read the given language). Also, hands make stuff dirty - you do want something there that's easy to clean, though that can just be a metal plate that can't be pulled.
- vinodkd 14y ago
  but you could take the sign away and imo people would still open the door - simply because that seems to be the only thing they could do. plus with the whole door surface being available, why would you use just your hands? use your shoulder or even back (if you happen to be carrying stuff in both hands)! seems to me like that would be more affordance.

phamilton 14y ago

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 anomaly mark it back online. It was pretty interesting and we took a good look at our architecture and found ways to better cater to acceptable failures.

there 14y ago
Audi's strategy in the early 2000s for winning Le Mans 12- and 24-hour endurance races against Bentley was to engineer their cars around failure. The Bentley cars were faster, but Audi engineered theirs to be easier to fix. Over such long races, there were bound to be crashes or failures of various parts and the faster Audi could fix their cars, the quicker they could get back out on the track to outlast the faster cars. A great example of this was that Bentley used the lightest bolt they could everywhere on the car to minimize weight, but Audi used the same size bolt everywhere to minimize the number of tool changes needed to replace the parts.
WalterBright 14y ago
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.
- Mvandenbergh 14y ago
  Nuclear power plants and oil rigs are also designed to withstand failure.
- GoodIntentions 14y ago
  >> 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.

mjg59 14y ago

http://www.marco.org/2012/02/25/right-vs-pragmatic http://www.marco.org/2012/02/25/right-vs-pragmatic is a similar example. It's important to cater for what people are going to do rather than what you think they should do.

stevenwei 14y ago

Then the bleeding-heart liberals attacked in 1988, complaining about their “filthy air” and their “lung cancer”. This was, of course, the thin end of the wedge. In 2000, the FAA banned smoking on commercial planes altogether. Talk about a bunch of buzz-kills. Really? Does anyone actually think this was a bad idea? Forget the "filthy air" or "lung cancer", exposure to smoke can seriously aggravate asthmatics and other folks with respiratory conditions, not to mention cause respiratory conditions in children. Surely smokers can abstain for a few hours instead of exposing everyone in a confined space to their cigarette smoke. I'm at a loss as to why anyone would complain about this.

there 14y ago
I took it to be sarcasm. Anyone that puts "lung cancer" in scarequotes has to be joking.
derleth 14y ago
And Poe's Law strikes again. On the other hand, yeah, there are people who honestly think that those regulations are a bad idea that bring us farther down the Road to Serfdom and the ultimate death of Western Culture.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  I always forget the name of Poe's Law, thank you.
MPSimmons 14y ago
I assure you, it was sarcasm.

snowwrestler 14y ago

The illustration of the door handle is a great example of piss-poor affordance. A slight ridge is not going to clearly communicate push vs. pull. Especially since our fingers, when gripping, actually like a ridge to fill in the open angle behind the first knuckles. If you want someone to push, give them a big fat flat metal plate or bar to push on. If they can't pull, they are guaranteed to get it right every time. I bet pretty much every restaurant kitchen and high school gym door in the U.S. gets this right.

jasonkester 14y ago
The door handle could actually be described as an anti-affordance. I looked at the photo and thought to myself what a great idea it was that it gave you a comfortable ridge for your knuckles while pulling and a nice rounded bit (instead of a sharp-edged flat surface) to push on. That is, it signalled to me the exact opposite of the designer's intended use. I would have been doubly surprised if pulling on that clearly "pull-only" handle didn't open the door.
- astrodust 14y ago
  Why not have a handle that's either concave or convex, bowing in or out, to indicate the desired direction? If it's shaped like a hook, you'll pull on it, or more like a dish, push on it.
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  Me too. Did the blogger just label it wrongly?
duaneb 14y ago
I would have tried to rotate both of those handles. You want to know a great user interface that is universally understood? PUSH: http://www.vanseodesign.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/door-push-bar.jpg http://www.vanseodesign.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/... PULL: http://www.artfactory.com/images/Door-Handle-HH199.jpg http://www.artfactory.com/images/Door-Handle-HH199.jpg The door handle sacrifices usability for aesthetics.

fabjan 14y ago

And Sweden.

joshuaheard 14y ago

I think the author gives the federal government too much credit. Which is more likely: the government out-witted people by thinking ahead and foreseeing people would break the law, so they write a law to counter it; or, they left the law on the books from when smoking was legal and never amended it? I think the latter.

Mvandenbergh 14y ago
The "federal government" as in the the FAA knows quite a bit about regulating airline safety. The probability that the FAA left a regulation in there because they just forgot to change it is pretty much 0.
- falcolas 14y ago
  I think you give them too much credit. When I was training to be a pilot some 10 years ago, I remember asking why a lot of regs were in the books. The answer was usually a shrug, or some anecdote about a corner case from the pioneer days of flying.

sparknlaunch12 14y ago

Not really surprised by smokers not being deterred by multiple warnings not to smoke on planes. Airlines rightly install ash trays to avoid smokers throwing cigarettes into the wrong place creating a real fire hazard. Remember being on a long haul flight and passenger next to me would disappear to the lavatory clearly sneaking a smoke. He also snuck off to sleep in first class. We have rules in place for the minority of society who lack common sense.

alexro 14y ago

First of all: why airplane toilets called bathrooms?

feintruled 14y ago
Delicate sensibilities. What is that phrase, civilization can be measured by how far we remove ourselves from our sewage? We're so darn civilized now we can't even indirectly refer to shit in polite company.
afterburner 14y ago
It's not the airplane; those facilities are simply called by different names in different parts of the English speaking world. Toilet, restroom, bathroom, WC, etc.
eru 14y ago
By the way, toilet is just another euphemism.

noonespecial 14y ago

Any time you find what you think is an irrational rule in aviation, you can usually trace it back to someone dying.

CoffeeAndCoffee 14y ago

I can't imagine being stuck in a floating smoke pit. The airlines would have to pay me to fly.

Symmetry 14y ago

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/solomons-knot-and-gray-markets.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/05/sol...

rprasad 14y ago
That's generally true of most first world countries, including the US and the UK. Contracts can be broken if they would require an illegal act (i.e., a "crime"), but regulatory infractions generally are not sufficient.

thereason 14y ago

I thought "and their "lung cancer"" was the best part. The fact that some on HN cannot detect the sense of humor is a little scary.