THE LAST SMOKING FLIGHT

Until the late 1980s, a passenger could light a cigarette on a United States airline flight. Cabins carried a smoking section, and nothing more than seating divided it from the nonsmoking rows. Sometimes the smoking rows sat at the front of the plane, so the smoke drifted back over everyone behind them. 1

The ritual ended in three steps. On April 23, 1988, a federal ban on smoking during domestic flights of two hours or less went into effect — about 80 percent of all U.S. flights. 2 On February 25, 1990, the ban was made permanent and extended to domestic flights of six hours or less, which reached nearly every domestic route. It did not reach the flight deck, and pilots were allowed to keep smoking. 13

The last step was statutory. The Wendell H. Ford Aviation Investment and Reform Act for the 21st Century, signed on April 5, 2000, amended 49 U.S.C. 41706 to prohibit smoking in scheduled passenger interstate, intrastate and foreign air transportation. That amendment took effect sixty days after enactment, and the Department of Transportation's final rule carrying it out was effective June 4, 2000. 3

The boundary matters, because the word "last" is doing work here. What ended on June 4, 2000 was smoking aboard scheduled passenger flights to and from the United States, on U.S. and foreign carriers alike. Nonscheduled charter flights, where a flight attendant is a required crewmember, were only brought under the ban by a change in the law in 2012. 4

One object of the ritual is still on the aircraft. The Federal Aviation Administration lists ashtrays in aircraft lavatories as minimum equipment, because passengers sometimes smoke anyway and a lavatory waste bin is not a safe place to put out a cigarette. In 2009, a Mexico-bound British Airways flight was grounded after it was found to be carrying none. 5

This episode is an AI-rendered reconstruction. Every image is an original generated scene; no archival footage is presented as documentary footage.