Smoking banned on all flights
 

Effective Sunday, smoking will be banned on all scheduled airline flights between the United States and other countries, the Transportation Department announced Friday.

The regulation bans smoking in the cabin or cockpit of flights by US or foreign airlines.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP...ss-Flying.html

Great...now I will never have to ask if a flight is non-smoking. Since I have only flown DL or its partners on internation though, this hasn't been a problem since 1994.

Up until I started reading this board, I thought it was fine for airlines to have smoking cabins as long as they were completely seperate from the non-smoking cabin. But after reading posts on this board, I now realize that air quality was only part of it. Smoking creates a fire hazard and that is dangerous - even if you are out on the wing.

This is ridiculous, not one accident in the past was caused by those "hazardous" cigarettes. I'm not a heavy smoker and I don't have any problem not to smoke for an 8 hrs. flight - but I just came back from a trip to Portugal and it was "nice" to have a cigarette while sipping coffee after lunch. I think, that AF's solution (having a bar like separated room aboard) is the best way.

This ban should have been implemented years ago.

Especially since second hand smoke was just added to the list of carcinogenic substances (see http://ehis.niehs.nih.gov/roc/toc9.html), it is clear that extra pollutants in the (recirculated) air is not a good idea. I'm very glad they implemented this.