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PaulRobinsontoday at 10:08 AM2 repliesview on HN

At least a decade.

I remember people could smoke on planes. On some airlines seat backs and bathrooms had cigarette ashtrays in them. Smoking was phased out between 1988 and 2000, with most airlines being smoke free in the mid-1990s.

But the ashtrays persisted well into the 2000s. Two reasons: they needed to refresh the cabins, which is on a longer maintenance cycle done every few years, and before that, they needed replacement seats and bathroom fittings without the ashtrays. That meant tests, regulatory approval, all sorts.

For ashtrays being removed.

Winglets are a similar story. They're an addition, but they needed test flying and type approval before they could be added to the maintenance cycle rotation and get added to aircraft.

This is a bigger change. Boeing and Airbus (and others), are going to need to design it, push it through CFD, build different variants, test fly them, get them through regulatory approval and then... well, existing aircraft are probably not going to get these. Too expensive, too hard.

What's going to make more sense is a new aircraft - even if it's a variant type like the 737-MAX or the A320-Neo or whatever - where they approve the type modification as a whole, but it's not a retrofit to an existing airframe, will help manufactures sell more aircraft, airlines don't need to ground existing fleet and over time the fuel efficiencies get involved.


Replies

bitdivisiontoday at 10:24 AM

The FAA still requires ashtrays in bathrooms interestingly. To avoid those who do smoke there using the trash and causing a fire:

  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
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.853
thaumasiotestoday at 10:53 AM

> For ashtrays being removed.

I don't think it's safe to generalize from this to a functional aspect of the plane. Removing the ashtrays serves no purpose, so there's no cost to letting it wait for a decade or two. Improving the aerodynamics does serve a purpose and might be done faster.

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