A Nightmare Flight Leaves Nonsmokers Fuming

What could be worse for a nonsmoker than the old days when airlines had no designated smoking sections?

It’s worse when the airline has a smoking section and puts a dozen nonsmokers in the last two rows of the plane, behind 60 cigarette-puffing die-hards, including a Middle Eastern trio with foul-smelling brown cigarettes that would put the fattest cigar to shame on the noxious fumes scale.

Add 10 or 12 smokers from the nonsmoking section who come back at least once an hour, trade seats with fellow smokers, puff a fast couple of cigarettes and then head back to their relatively clean-air seating farther forward.

Schedule this punishment on a transatlantic flight from which there is no escape and be sure the plane is full. In fact, hold the plane an extra 20 minutes at Charles de Gaulle Airport outside Paris to accommodate three standby passengers who arrived at the last minute.

In doing that, lose the jetliner’s place in line and wait on the ground for another 90 minutes after getting a new takeoff time. That ensures that the poor smokers will really need a hit once the plane is aloft.

This is not a worst-case scenario, but a real situation aboard a certain airline’s flight from Paris to Washington.

Checked in Early

We had no seat assignments, but we checked in a full two hours ahead of flight time and were told that there were no seats left in the nonsmoking section. We were told to go ahead and take a seat assignment in the smoking section to be assured of getting seats at all, and to ask at the gate about getting our seats changed.

We asked at the gate as soon as it opened, an hour later. We were told that it was too late to do anything about it in the terminal and to ask the flight attendant when we got on board if we could change our seats.

When we boarded the plane we asked the flight attendant for seats in the nonsmoking section.

She said: “Oh, they’ve made it our problem, huh?” She said to take our seats and ask the section attendant for a change. “There’s a family of four behind you who are also nonsmokers,” she said. “We’ve known about this problem since Geneva.”

“So, basically, we’re just supposed to keep agitating?” I asked.

“Oh, no!” she said. “Please, that won’t get you anywhere.”

Nothing got us anywhere except in the seats we were assigned, behind the smokers. But in front of a Swiss family of four, which included two medium-size children.

We took our seats and read the fine print on the boarding pass, which declares: “(This airline) provides smoking and nonsmoking sections aboard flights scheduled for more than two hours. Assignment of no-smoking area seats to standby passengers and to passengers who present themselves at the boarding gates less than 20 minutes before scheduled departure time is subject to availability.”

But on this flight, all no-smoking seats were subject to availability. The airline did not accommodate nonsmokers who arrived two hours early.

The flight attendants did ask a few people to volunteer to change their seats, especially for the Swiss family of four with their long, mournful faces, but no one was willing to budge. In the interests of getting background for this story, I chatted with a flight attendant while we waited for takeoff.

“It’s a mess,” she said. “They should take better care of it at the gate. They should at least move the nonsmokers to the front of the smoking section instead of putting them way in the rear. On this flight we have several married couples split up, including a pregnant woman who wanted to sit with her husband. But at least we were able to find a single seat for her in a nonsmoking section.

“It’s a problem in Europe only,” she said. “They don’t really take it seriously.”

As the flight wore on, people standing in the long lines to use the toilets were smoking cigarettes. One young woman smoked three in a row, sitting on a man’s lap, before returning to her seat in another section. A flight attendant finally asked her to trade seats with a complainer in the smoking section. She left in a huff, only to return within the hour for another cigarette.

We coughed, sneezed and sniffled. As aversion therapy, it worked. I’ll never fly that airline again!

The airline’s vice president of public affairs said he is not aware of any such problems and that this was the first nonsmoker’s complaint that had been brought to his attention. “Normally, we get complaints from smokers who had their seats taken away,” he said. “I’ve never heard of this problem before.”

The airline’s policy, he said, is to comply with U.S. law, separating smokers and nonsmokers on international as well as domestic flights. “Unless you arrived late or were on standby, there is no reason why you shouldn’t have been given a seat in the no-smoking section.

“This was human error,” he said. “Somebody didn’t follow procedures.”

The attendant at check-in said, “I’ll be glad when they make the whole flight nonsmoking.”

I agree. Meanwhile, I would settle for smokers’ seat assignments to be given starting in the back row and going forward instead of trying to mystically divine how many smokers there will be and piling in the nonsmokers behind them.

And while we’re at it, smoking privileges should be limited to those who asked for assigned seats in the smoking section. People who want to sit in clean air should not be allowed to add to the pollution elsewhere.