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In the ever-changing world of what we can and can’t take on a plane, August 4, 2007, brought a reversal of one rule, so that most kinds of cigarette lighters are now again allowed to be taken on to airplanes. The TSA has reversed its previous decision to ban them in accordance with its focus on more dangerous and risky objects.

Apparently, enforcing the ban on lighters was taking a huge amount of resources: can you believe that during the ban, 22,000 lighters were surrendered each day at airports across the country (the peak day reached a total of 39,000!). Of course, high workload alone is not the reason the ban has been lifted: it has been decided that lighters are not a serious threat to safety, and that’s clearly in agreement with the rest of the world, since the US was the only country ever to ban lighters from being taken on board.

So to those travelers who contributed their lighter to the 11.6 million lighters confiscated during 2006, sorry. But now that they have been declared not to be a serious threat, you can keep your lighter with you, ready to light up as soon as you reach an area where you’re allowed to smoke.