Flying in a Fug

We flew to Dunedin for the weekend; on the way down we went on a Bombadier Q300, and on the way back we came up on one of Air New Zealand’s ATR 72-500s, which provided me with a vision of hell.

This specific vision was definitely related to the age of our ATR’s fittings—Ada started playing with something on the armrest: the old, now disused, ashtrays. I rejoice at travelling in an era were I do not spend the better part of two hours trapped in a confined space with chain smokers belching smoke into the aircon.

(As an aside, it must surely be a demonstration of the hold smoking used to exert on our society that in aircraft, where so much effort is put into removing fire harzards in the wiring and construction materials, we’d allow people to light up in the first place.)