Anthony O. Miller
EXPERIMENTAL smoke-free Cyprus Airways (CA) flights took to the skies with only a few complaints this week, as pilots puffed away in the cockpits and passengers and cabin crew abstained in the rear, CA spokesman Tassos Angelis said yesterday.
Cabin crew co-operation in the trial non-smoking flights to London and Athens Heathrow followed initial protests – and threats of industrial action – over the CA ban on their lighting up, while letting pilots smoke in the cockpits.
“I spoke with the cabin staff management, and they have some initial feedback. They didn’t get all the reports, but the preliminary feedback is that we didn’t have any particular problems” with the smoke-free flights, Angelis said.
With only preliminary information, a fuller picture will emerge only later this week, after all cabin-crew reports are in management’s hands, he said. Before then, “we cannot make any real comments,” he said.
“There were some complaints,” Angelis admitted. “One passenger said that: ‘I was not told at the check-in desk that it’s a non-smoking flight.’ That was a comment by one passenger, one of the few hundred that flew,” in the smoke-free trials yesterday and on Monday. “But no serious objections, no serious problems,” otherwise, he said.
Angelis said one cabin report claimed “everyone was happy, even the heavy smokers. That’s what the purser said. But in order to be correct, we’ll have to wait a few days.”
“There was smoking in the cockpit, because the cockpit doesn’t in any way affect the rest (of the plane) – I mean it’s a natural place,” Angelis said. “It’s isolated (from the passenger compartment’s ventilation system), he said, adding: “It’s the captain’s prerogative to allow or not to allow smoking there.”
The smoke-free flights resulted from a poll by the airline that showed 90 per cent of CA passengers preferred smoke-free flights – the kind more and more international carriers are introducing. British Airways bans all smoking on all its flights and even Olympic Airways bans smoking on domestic flights in Greece.
Angelis disputed the suggestion that smoking, reducing as it does the amount of oxygen going to the brain, might constitute a hazard by affecting pilots’ reactions.
“You can hear the opposite argument from pilots. They say (that without their nicotine ‘fix’), ‘We cannot concentrate, we have this nervousness.’ Withdrawal symptoms,” Angelis said.
US law bars all smoking in all parts of all planes in US airspace. But Angelis said many companies followed the same ‘pilots only’ policy that CY was testing: “There are companies that follow this policy (pilots only). There are companies that follow the other policy (total ban), and there are companies that have no policy at all.”
“Our objective is to have encouraging results out of this survey, and proceed with prohibiting smoking all over our network,” he declared.
The trial runs through to March 28.
