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I’m increasingly blown away at the people who are willing to write detailed answers on Quora with no knowledge of the subject. It’s like fiction. It’s like they simply conjure up how they think something works and then write a long answer. Wow!AIRLINER PRESSURIZATIONAll of the air you breathe is taken in by the engines and highly compressed, which results in the air being heated by the compression process. Most engine air goes through the engines to drive them, but some is bled off for pressurization and the air that’s bled off is about 500F.Here’s the relevant point about this, which debunks some answers I’ve read. All of the air in a typical airline cabin is totally replaced about every one to two minutes—depending on cabin size. It comes in up front, flows through the cabin and exits through an aptly named outflow valve behind the cabin.Pressurization control is actually kind of crude because it simply dumps in way too much air and then controls pressure by modulating the outflow valve. Need more pressure? The outflow closes down a bit. Need less? It opens. Pilots do not control the valve, we just turn on the system and set parameters and the system modulates the valve.STICKY OUTFLOW VALVESI began airline flying when smoking was allowed. The outflow valves were disgusting! The door itself would get gooey and brown with tar and the side of the fuselage behind the outflow had a streak of tar a couple of feet long.It was routine to experience bumps in the cabin air pressure due to an outflow valve that had so much tar on it, it would stick shut. Then the system would try to open it, but it stuck until more pressure was applied, then finally popped open and everyone’s ears popped. Hundreds of times, I called inbound to request the outflow be washed.Of course there’s more than the outflow, there’s the whole duct that gets the air to the valve. And the rear cabin area would get coated. One person wrote that oxygen masks would get coated so badly, they’d stick and not drop down. This, however, would have been only in the smoking section and aft of there. But cleaning the tar was a significant maintenance expense.Then there was the cleaning of the ashtrays. And the carpet. And burns to the seats. So the real answer is mostly to reduce maintenance costs.WHAT ABOUT SECOND-HAND SMOKE IN SUCH A SMALL SPACEHA! And I’m as bad as you can get about hating second-hand smoke. My parents were chain smokers, as were all their friends and my aunts and uncles. I hated it, which is why I’ve never even touched a cigarette—much less tried smoking.But that wasn’t a real factor in airliners, in which every molecule of air is exchanged every minute or so. There’s no way for second-hand smoke to hang around. That’s why smoking was in the back. That’s where the air went.This weird analogy popped into my head:Imagine you’re standing in a fast-flowing river and someone downstream of you pees in it. Does that affect you? No, the flow carries it away. We used to get people way up front who would complain. It was their imagination because that would be like someone peeing in a river 50 feet downstream of you—you wouldn’t be affected.Honestly, despite the massive airflow, the last row of non-smoking could get some smoke if the smoker behind them blew out strongly. We had fights over that. But it can’t hang around inside the raging river of air that flows through a cabin. To continue my peeing analogy, even if you were standing in a river and a guy peed right next to you. You might be affected a little.Lavs were a different story. That air gets trapped, and the surfaces can get coated with tar.And the aft galley was impacted by smoke and tar in the air because all of the air in the cabin was going there on its way out the back. The poor flight attendants in the aft galley working in a flow that included all of the smoke from the entire smoking section. Surfaces back there got coated. So, those who worked back there were affected.So, mostly, due to maintenance costs. But not due to second-hand smoke issues.

I offer a little insight on how and why I price my lunches and dinners.When you pay for your restaurant visit, you pay for a number of things. The two big ones are "food and production" and "hospitality". Now, to break those apart, here's what goes where:Food and Production:Purchase (raw food cost)StoragePreparationCookingDishes and BoH ("back of house") operationsHospitality:Lease/Mortgage/TaxesFoH ("front of house") payrollLinens and cleaning costFees and Subscriptions (includes, for example, reservation systems, credit card processing, that stuff)License costsDepreciation, lossSome things are static, such as my lease, power, linens, licenses, etc. Other things vary between lunch and dinner:Lunch isn't prepared and served by my A-team. Many times waiters and cooks have to prove themselves during lunch before being allowed on the dinner line. This means I pay less in payroll.Lunch doesn't usually serve a full menu. The menu is optimized for faster production and oftentimes smaller portioned. Smaller menu means less storage, smaller dishes mean less storage, and faster turnaround means less secondary storage costs (hot/warm holding, etc.)Lunch diners spend an average of 45 minutes from entry to exit, dinner guests take over twice as long. This means faster turnaround during lunch hours, which either means more covers or less staff needed. Both saves me money.Lunch guests don't want/need candles and expensive bottles of water. They want food. We cater to this by dropping down to the bare bone of fine dining hospitality, removing fluff.Last, but not least, lunch is a competitive market. We compete with in-house cafeterias, the dirty water hot dog cart, chain restaurants, and delivery businesses. By pricing ourselves competitively we ensure good covers every day of the week (low day is Tuesday, high day is Thursday, by the way) and a hot, pre-stocked, kitchen for dinner. That saves us money (I don't have to pay someone to come in at 3pm and set up stocks and sauces, for example, I can have the lunch crew do those during slows and as part of their prep) and time, which in and by itself is money.

Once your stuff is taken away at security gates at airports, those things now probably don't belong to you or never coming back to you. Period.Many travellers around the globe are aware about the fact that they are not allowed to have any suspected carry-on's at the security gates. There are certain guidelines set just not to allow pass through some goods from security checks.Carrying these prohibited items with you at security checks might prove to be a costly mistake because there are practically no chances of getting those back.Sources say, items consficated at the airports are simply disposed, sold or donated to the charitable trusts.1.Foods and beverages:Of course anything that can spill and cause nuisance to the flight operations,is not allowed on board.However only eatables allowed on board are served by the cabin crew.Seized eatables are generally destroyed or thrown away.I remember a friend of mine who was carrying a home made 'ghee' with him at airports.Security guy noticed and took it away.No matter how appetising the siezed item is, security personnel are not allowed to take it home.2.Weapons and armaments.Don't even think to carry one on board.To everyone's surprise, the number of people carrying weapons on board is not at all reducing every year.Still many travellers love to carry nail clippers, knives , razors and blades with them which is forbidden. Reason being these can be used as weapons on board.Some big airports have a facility where you can keep your stuff and collect it on your way back to home.Some people ask for a mail service from airport to local post offices from where they can collect their belongings, but again that is a cumbersome process to be in.Airport authorities keep seized belongings with them for a period,waiting for the owners to come and collect but in case they don't show up then authorities have right to sell those off in auctions.A lot of things go directly to the charitable trusts.Heathrow airport reportedly send goods like Soaps, toiletries and sanitary seized from the travellers to NGO's and charitable trusts mostly for free or in the exchange of nominal charges.