For years now smoking on airplanes has been forbidden and most people accept this. For non-smokers the banning of smoking on airplanes has certainly been beneficial, and even most smokers put up with it without grumbling too much. But there are some smokers, who suffer real stress and anxiety even on short haul flights because or their enforced nicotine deprivation.

Do you remember when, before boarding a airplane the check-in staff would ask you whether you’d like to be seated in the smoking or non-smoking cabin section? Having chosen the former, you would instinctively move towards the back of the plane. Having impatiently waited for the “No Smoking” sign to switch off after take-off, you would then light up.

A lot of us will still recall those days, either with horror or with a certain amount of nostalgia, depending on which camp you used to belong to. The fact is, it seems like a scene from a different age. Nowadays the idea of smoking on an airplane is for most of us totally unthinkable.

Yet there is a largely ignored group of hard-core smokers, who find it simply impossible to give up smoking. For these people the ban of smoking on airplanes continues to pose a real problem. Some of them will even forgo long-haul travel altogether, because the thought of not being able to smoke for a period of several hours is just not worth contemplating.

For the last few months a product has started to hit the headlines that tries to address this problem. Electronic cigarettes, first launched in 2004, look much like the real thing, but deliver a deceptively smoke-like tobacco or otherwise flavoured nicotine mist instead of smoke. Although the experience does not exactly replicate that of smoking a cigarette, it does come pretty amazingly close and the upside is that the vapour contains as an active agent only nicotine and none of the other 4000 odd carcinogenic chemicals that normal tobacco smoke consists of.

Not only does the user not do himself any significant harm - if taken in moderation nicotine is, whilst being highly addictive, in itself not any more harmful than caffeine – he is also not exposing anyone else to any toxic substances.

Because no tobacco is being burnt and nothing is being “lit”, the electronic cigarette escapes the various smoking bans and can therefore technically be used wherever you wish, be that on an airplane or in a restaurant. The relative novelty of the product will at first undoubtedly raise a few eyebrows, if not disapprovingly, then at least out of interest.

For those smokers who have been restricted in their travels because of their inability to smoke on airplanes, such a device could solve a real problem however.