No smoking..... no more

Emirates to debut shisha smoking lounge onboard aircraft



Premium passengers traveling on Dubai-based airline Emirates will be exempt from the no-smoking policy starting next month, when the carrier debuts a shisha lounge on select jumbo jets.

The new service is set to debut on the carrier's fleet of Airbus A380 aircraft and will be offered to Emirates' business and first-class passengers.

Passengers can pre-order a shisha -- also known as a waterpipe, hubble-bubble, hookah or narghile -- from the onboard menu and retire to the lounge for a post-meal smoke beginning in June.
Waterpipes could loosely be described as the Middle Eastern version of the post-dinner cigar, passing flavored tobacco through bubbled water which is then smoked through a pipe and hose.
Emirates says it's introducing the Signature Shisha Lounge to enrich the flying experience for Middle Eastern passengers, but also to introduce the Arabian custom to foreigners.

Meanwhile, the new service risks inviting controversy given that shisha pipes carry what some medical authorities describe as a misleading reputation for being a recreational and harmless form of smoking.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the tobacco is no less toxic in a hookah pipe.
Contrary to belief, nor does the water filter out toxic ingredients found in the tobacco smoke.

In fact, the CDC estimates that due to the way shisha pipes are smoked and shared -- frequency of puffing, depth of inhalation, and length of smoking sessions -- a typical, one-hour long session could be tantamount to inhaling 100 to 200 times the volume of smoke inhaled from a single cigarette.