It's almost unbelievable to think it was once okay to light up in a pressurized cabin floating six miles up into the atmosphere.

Oh boy this is the life! Ha ha.

Especially in a world where bringing a bottle of water through security is now banned.

In fact in the US, smoking on flights wasn't fully banned until the year 2000.

But if you look closely, planes still have ashtrays.

How can that be? Well, there's a pretty good reason why.

The first commercial flight took place on January 1st, 1914, flying the 20 or so miles between St. Petersburg and Tampa Florida.

That short bumpy ride was all people needed. Investments and demand turned that into a regularly flown route.

Commercial aviation had started to take root and safety concerns were never far behind.

The Air Commerce Act of 1926 was the first attempt to establish standards with regards to commercial aviation.

However, smoking regulation was not a part of it.

In the United States, commercial jet travel started in the late 1950s and smoking was common.

In fact, in some cases, it was encouraged.

Cigarette ads tried to associate smoking with the perception that airplane travel was higher class, even sexy.

They sure think of everything, including our Winstons!

Mmmm tastes good.

Like a cigarette should.

But the flight attendants union didn't see it that way.

They formally began trying to ban smoking on all flights by the mid 1960s.

This coming on the back of a 1964 report from the Surgeon General's office highlighting the dangers of smoking.

The report was eye opening to the American public of which 42 percent were smokers.

Changing attitudes and the fact the Surgeon General suggested a ban on smoking in public places gaining the union some traction in 1971.

That's when some US-based carriers instituted smoking sections on planes.

And that's laughable because with the doors closed, the inside of an airplane is a closed system, meaning if one person smokes, everyone's getting some.

In 1973, a plane flying from Brazil to France went down after a suspected cigarette was thrown into the garbage, starting a blaze that wasn't able to be put out.

The plane crash landed in an onion field killing a 123 of the 134 people on board.

A domestic flight in China suffered a similar fate in 1982, when a passenger's cigarette caused a fire that killed 25 people.

There are incidents like this going back as far as 1935.

A 2002 study conducted by the United Kingdom's Civil Aviation Authority shows how deadly an on-board fire can be.

The research found that after a fire starts within a large airplane cabin, pilots have 17 minutes to get on the ground before the recycled smoke turns deadly.

Although serious, thankfully, incidents where cigarettes cause fires on planes that turn deadly are few and far between relative to overall air traffic.

Banning cigarettes on planes was really more about a workplace health issue of secondhand smoke.

The man move closer in 1986 when the Surgeon General called secondhand smoke a serious health risk.

That caused the National Academy of Sciences to call for a ban on smoking during all domestic flights, citing the health risk secondhand smoke posed to those who work on board.

Finally, in 1988 Ronald Reagan signed the legislation banning smoking on all domestic flights less than two hours long.

That was the foot in the door that eventually ended smoking on all flights originating from and or arriving at US based airports.

Yet, we still have ashtrays on planes and that's by law.

Title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations, CHAPTER 1, Sub chapter C, PART 25, Sub part D, Section 25.853, Paragraph G says about planes that

laboratories must have self-contained removable ashtrays located conspicuously on or near the entry side of each lavatory door.

If more than half are broken, they have to be repaired within 72 hours.

Why? The answer is simple.

People still smoke on planes.

In fact, in May of 2018, a plane had to make an emergency landing in San Jose California.

Police say that was due to a fire started by a customer smoking a cigarette in the bathroom.

Check out any flight attendant AMFA and you'll see countless examples of people getting caught.

We need to have ashtrays so that a smoker lighting up in the lavatory doesn't get nervous about getting caught and try and stick a lit cigarette in the bathroom garbage,

lighting the plane on fire and potentially killing everyone.

Please. Please don't smoke on planes.

Everybody's already miserable as it is.

We're all just trying to get to our destination for our 85th wedding of this year.

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