Northwest Clears the Air

The No Smoking sign will soon be turned on permanently aboard all domestic flights of Northwest Airlines, the nation’s fifth-largest air carrier. Beginning April 23, the same day that a federally ordered smoking ban takes effect on all domestic flights lasting under two hours, Northwest will enforce a blanket smoking prohibition regardless of a flight’s duration. This decision has been applauded by the major lung, heart and cancer associations, and deservedly so. The clear evidence, as the National Academy of Sciences reported in 1986, is that segregating smokers aboard an airliner is not effective in protecting nonsmokers from the hazardous pollutants in cigarette smoke. A total smoking ban will be a welcome public-health measure.

An airliner is both a work site and a public place. It is also a sealed area where ventilation can be poor and where the avoidance of smoke and odors can be impossible. Smoking has increasingly come to be banned or limited at work sites and in public places across the nation. Flight attendants, doing their jobs at 30,000 feet, ought to have the same workplace rights as if they were in an office or a shop on the ground. Airline passengers deserve the same protection against exposure to smoke that riders on buses or elevators are given.

Northwest says that more than 80% of its passengers are nonsmokers who will welcome a smoke-free environment. Even among its smoking passengers, the airline says, 30% indicate that they prefer sitting in nonsmoking sections of a plane. Northwest is prepared to lose passengers who can’t forgo smoking to other air carriers in the expectation that their places will be filled by more nonsmokers. Other airlines are taking a wait-and-see attitude. Credit Northwest with the willingness to run a business gamble. If its experiment is seen to make good business sense, other airlines will no doubt adopt it. What’s clear already is that its policy makes good health sense. Credit Northwest, too, with performing a public service.