Banning lighters from flights costs company $5 million a year

Talk about consituency service! Congress is debating such weight issues as whether to impose a 100 percent inspection on U.S.-bound freight containers and whether federal rules regarding the safety of chemical plants should preempt state rules. Representative John Peterson (R-Pennsylvania), though, urges Congress to consider another homeland security issue: Cigerette lighters. More precisely: Zippo lighters. Zippo Manufacturing is located in Braford, a city in Peterson’s northwest Pennsylvania home district, and the congressman says that the TSA’s ban on taking lighters on board costs his constituents about $5 million a year. “In my view,” he said at a hearing of the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee, this “is not a risk, it’s just a bad decision.” Peterson added that Zippos are treasured throughout the world. “They’re given as gifts, they’re coveted” in other countries.

In December 2004 Congress added lighters to the list of items not allowed on flights. In June 2005 the rule was amended and passengers are now allowed to carry up to two fueled Zippo lighters in their checked bags.

“When they mandated that lighters could no longer be carried, that did in fact hurt our business,” Greg Booth, president and CEO of Zippo Manufacturing Company, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Booth estimated that the ban has hurt sales to tourists — in stores both inside and outside airports — in the range of $5 million a year.

-read more in Beverly Lumpkin’s Seattle PI report