After manspreading – and eating a stinky tuna sandwich onboard – a passenger took out his vape. His seat opponent decided to report him to a flight attendant onboard as revenge for being rude throughout the flight. The man “started going off” which brought the flight attendant back into the conflict.

When she asked him to stop he pretended like he didn’t know it was illegal, but when he was going off on me for telling on him he admitted to knowing it was illegal lmao. After she asked him to stop he just went to vape in the bathroom instead. He also admitted to the flight attendant that he was in fact hitting his vape.

Guy vaping on the plane next to me
byu/Jeix9 inmildlyinfuriating

Amazingly, the flight didn’t divert and crew didn’t have law enforcement meet the plane. Instead, the vaper just got a stern warning and no penalty. Mostly, he was a jerk. And other than escalating the conflict, wasn’t actually creating a risk to the aircraft. Vaping is against the rules but not a safety risk.

From the photo, this appears to me to be a WestJet flight. The napkin shows a McCafé logo and WestJet serves McCafé coffee. The “Literature Only / Papier seulement” tells me this is a Canadian carrier, and the teal accents flag WestJet as well.

It’s notable, though, that the U.S. rule against vaping onboard really is just the rule against smoking even though the two are very different.

• The FAA has interpreted the prohibition on cigarette smoking to include vaping products. According to the rulemaking,

  The NPRM stated our position that the reasons supporting the statutory and regulatory ban on smoking also apply to a ban on e-cigarettes

• That’s the case even though the FAA rule explicitly allows a passenger to emit vapor if it is from a “medically beneficial substance.” So it’s not about banning vapor.

• The regulation simply extends the ban on cigarettes to include e-cigarettes, which weren’t contemplated when the law against on board smoking was passed.

Note also that the concern wasn’t batteries, as some people mistakenly believe. Laptops, cell phones, tablets, and noise cancelling headphones are permitted. And the ban on vaping predates concerns over external batteries. Plus, airlines do have procedures – and burn bags – for dealing with outlier issues inflight.

There’s a stigma against vaping, and other passengers might think vapers are smoking a cigarette even though they aren’t.

The first airline to create a nonsmoking section was United back in 1971. No U.S. airline fully banned smoking worldwide until Delta in 1994. U.S. airlines were still allowed to offer on board smoking up until 2000.

Yet planes still have ashtrays! You’ll usually find them in or near the lavatory, because customers may smoke even though it’s illegal to do so – and they need a place to put out their cigarettes. Without ashtrays they’d be most likely to put out their cigarettes in the lavatory trash.. and light the paper tossed away inside on fire.

One passenger who lit her cigarette inflight says police beat her after flight attendants spiked her drink. And in 2020 a passenger lit up a cigarette after refusing to wear a mask on board.

Before the pandemic another passenger downed 4 bottles of beer, vaped an e-cigarette, and punched a flight attendant all before his honeymoon. Another lit a cigarette, drank his own booze, and bit a flight attendant’s ear. While a man who burned himself with his own e-cigarette on board had the temerity to sue the airline.