I WOULD like to clarify Cathay Pacific's policy on smoking inflight, which has been the subject of a number of letters recently. We are totally committed to being driven by the needs and preferences of the customer. In an industry as competitive as air transport, the customer ultimately decides for us which products and services we provide. Smoking is an awkward issue in that, unlike musical entertainment or food, it is hard to offer a choice. An aircraft cannot be divided physically into smoking and smoke-free areas. The preferences of two types of customer conflict: if there is smoke in the cabin it may offend non-smokers, while on a no-smoking flight smokers are inconvenienced. In deciding how to tackle this problem, we have looked to our customers, with the result that most of our flights are now non-smoking. As of March 1, when all our European services go smoke-free, smoking will be allowed only on a limited number of flights including those to Japan and Korea. Research shows that nearly half of the customers on these flights prefer to smoke. It is difficult to know where to draw the line. The ultimate aim is to give as many customers as possible what they want. It is quite probable that in the medium term this will lead to Cathay Pacific being a totally smoke-free airline. Rosa Tang in her letter in the South China Morning Post, on February 23 made a couple of points that I would like to address. First she said that she doesn't like ''someone or some company telling me when I can and when I can't [smoke].'' As I have already said, on our smoke-free routes Cathay Pacific as a company is effectively passing on the message from the majority of customers who do not want smoke in the cabin. Ms Tang suggests that we allow smoking on our North Asian routes because ''Japanese and Korean people are big spenders and most of them do smoke''. The smoking/no-smoking decision relates to the fact that ''most of them do smoke'' and not to their nationality or spending power. We are not trying to make a moral case one way or the other. We simply want to give as many of our customers as possible the product of their choice. C. F. KWAN Corporate Communication Manager HK Cathay Pacific