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State &Local
1 Page 3
The Battalion
Monday, September 23,1991
Smokers’ airline will place non-smokers at rear of plane
Dallas entrepreneur will offer
services in spite of regulations
DALLAS (AP) — It sounds like a
smoker's dream: an airline on which they
can light up and where non-smokers will
have to sit in the back of the plane.
Dallas entrepreneur Kay Cohlmia is
preparing to offer such a service from Ok
lahoma City and Dallas to Las Vegas.
He said service will begin at Will
Rogers World Airport on Oct. 1 regard
less of a U.S. Department of Transporta
tion prohibition against smoking on air
line flights of less than six hours' dura
tion.
Although he calls his proposed opera
tion an airline, Cohlmia also refers to it as
a smoking club, which he says can oper
ate under less restrictive charter flight
smoking rules.
Cohlmia said he
will charge passengers
a $10 annual fee for
flying privileges to jus
tify calling his Ameri
can Smokers' Airline a
club.
Then, as he envisions it, a traveler
yearning for gambling casino pleasures
can report to the boarding gate at the Dal-
las-Fort Worth or Oklahoma City air
ports, flash a membership card and buy a
low-rate ticket to Las Vegas on American
Smokers' Airline.
Once aboard the plane, which
Cohlmia says will resemble a lighted
cigarette, the passenger can light up, or
der a drink and buy cigarettes by the car
ton at bargain rates.
The next stop is Las Vegas.
He says his new airline will begin ser
vice Oct. 1, although officials at Will
Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City say he
hasn't told them about it.
"We'll contact one of the airlines al
ready in Oklahoma City to get a boarding
gate at Will Rogers," Cohlmia said.
As for advising Will Rogers officials of
his plans, he said, "Las Vegas welcomed
me and DFW (the Dallas-Fort Worth Air
port) welcomed me.
Why not Oklahoma
City?"
Cohlmia said he
decided to start the
airline as a reaction to
the negative treatment smokers have
been getting recently.
"It's getting to the point that everyone
is discriminating against us smokers," he
said.
His personal view of smoking, he
said, is "If you smoke, that's your busi
ness.
"If I smoke, that's my business. If we
both smoke, that's our business."
Cohlmia said he will charge members
$199 per round-trip ticket to Las Vegas ei
ther from Dallas or Oklahoma City if they
pay cash 10 days in advance.
Twenty percent of the seats on each
fight will be reserved for non-smokers —
in the back where he said ventilation is
better.
The gravelly-voiced Cohlmia said he
was born in Wichita, Kan., lived in Enid
as a child and attended Southwestern Ok
lahoma State University in Weatherford.
He said he is a two-pack-a-day smok
er, but he said he has been trying to quit.
"I quit every morning. Sometimes I go
till noon," he said.
Why does he keep trying to quit if it's
so tough?
"It's a filthy, disgusting habit," he
said.
Dentist makes attempt to dispel AIDS rumor
BAYTOWN (AP) - A dentist
plagued by false rumors and ter
rified patients mailed letters to
3,000 families and colleagues to
dispel the myth he was suffering
from AIDS.
Dr. David R. Wooten, with a
20-year practice, a wife and three
children, found himself reassur
ing nearly all his patients, who
had heard he had the contagious
and fatal disease.
Alarmed, Wooten quickly
traced the rumor back through
more than a dozen people, in
cluding a worker at another den
tal office in town.
In an effort to kill the rumor,
Wooten mailed about 3,000 letters
to patients and other dentists
around Baytown, about 20 miles
east of Houston, to assure them
he was healthy and that he and
his staff had been tested and were
clear of the human immunodefi
ciency virus.
"The U.S. mail is not any
faster than a Baytown rumor,"
Wooten said. "I felt open commu
nication was the best solution to
everything, rather than just stick
ing my head in the sand. Because
of the nature of AIDS, it is a blank
screen for people to project their
fears."
He said dentists are getting a
bum rap since a Florida dentist.
Dr. David Acer, became the first
health professional known to
have infected patients with AIDS
before dying of it himself in
September 1990. Some experts
blamed the transmission of the
disease on inadequate steriliza
tion procedures.
The Centers for Disease Con
trol in Atlanta says the chance of
contracting AIDS through a den
tal procedure is about 1 in 2.6 mil-
lion.
The Baytown rumors had
Wooten being ill lately, losing a
lot of weight and watching his
staff walk out.
None of it was true, he said.
"I still have no earthly idea
how the rumor started," he said,
'T had not seen any detrimen
tal effect on my patient caseload
from the rumor, but I didn't want
to take any chances," Wooten
said. "Sometimes I might not see
some of them for six months or a
year."
Senate approves funding for wildlife refuge
SAN ANTONIO (AP) — The acting presi
dent of the Frontera Audubon Society said val
ley environmentalists will be closely watching
a House-Senate conference committee, which
will consider a proposal to acquire 10,000 acres
for the Lower Rio Grande Natural Wildlife
Refuge.
The U.S. Senate approved $7 million last
week for the project.
The funding proposal, part of a multi-mil-
lion dollar package for a variety of outdoor
projects in the Texas Panhandle, the Valley,
and the San Antonio area, now goes to confer
ence committee.
"It's just crucial that we get this money,"
Maurie Haas, acting president of the Frontera
Audubon Society, told the San Antonio Ex
press-News on Saturday.
The House has already approved $5 mil
lion for the project and Ms. Haas said she ex
pects the two branches to split the difference in
their funding proposals.
Environmentalists frequently testify for
funds for the refuge, which was established in
the late 1970s. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Ser
vice usually has funds in hand by December to
keep the refuge growing, she said.
Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, D-Texas, pushed for
the funds.
Oil industry expects
decline in drilling rigs
HOUSTON (AP) - The na
tion's drilling rig count — the
most-watched barometer in the oil
patch — is expected to fall to 750
next year, marking the lowest lev
el of domestic drilling activity in a
half century.
The bellwether number soared
above 4,500 during the glory days
of the Texas energy boom.
The drop to 750 would be the
lowest level since 1942 when the
demands of a war in Europe gob
bled up the nation's steel supply,
making it impossible to build the
platforms and pipelines needed to
keep the crude flowing.
Today, however, the indus
try's woes aren't nearly as fleeting.
A two-year decline in the price
of natural gas and a steady drop in
the nation's oil output has
prompted a flight of people, com
panies and money from the U.S.
oil industry.
That combined with the sag
ging rig count, has added to the
anxiety of an industry already
worried that its heyday may be
over.
"We are seeing a fundamental
shift in the U.S. that just won't
support a larger rig count," said
Richard Spears, vice president of
Spears & Associates, a Tulsa,
Okla., energy consulting compa
ny.
"It's a sad thing," he told the
Houston Chronicle. "We've been
the leader forever. It's just not the
case anymore."
While it is impossible to gauge
the health of an entire industry
solely on the rig count projections
— particularly since the estimates
often are wrong — experts say the
lower numbers serve as an impor
tant indicator of the industry's
sliding health.
The count is expected to aver
age about 874 rigs this year, down
13.5 percent from 1,010 in 1990, ac
cording to Baker Hughes.
"We are an endangered
species," warns Raymond Plank,
chairman of Apache Corp., an in
dependent energy company mov
ing from Denver to Houston.
"Right now, we can use all the
help we can get."
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