Up In Smoke
“The Airline Flight Attendants’ Fight to End Smoking Aloft”
This exhibition is drawn from the Center’s collection of items related to the adverse health impact of exposure to tobacco smoke on commercial aircraft during most of the 20th century, with a focus on the decades-long battle by flight attendants for smoke-free airlines. Highlights of the collection include original advertisements and photographs depicting passengers smoking on airlines, scientific reports on the impact of exposure to secondhand smoke, newspaper and magazine articles, and editorials and political cartoons. Among the original artifacts are airline ashtrays, sample cigarette packs given to passengers, flight attendant instruction manuals, and airport duty-free shop cigarette promotions. This is an online version of the exhibition that was on view at the Louis A. Turpen Aviation Museum and Library at the San Francisco International Airport from September 15, 2004 to March 15, 2005 and was at the Southern Museum of Flight in Birmingham, Alabama From October, 2010 to March, 2011. Additional items from the collection will be periodically uploaded.
The Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute (FAMRI) was formed in 2000 as the result of the settlement of a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of non-smoking flight attendants by Florida attorneys Stanley and Susan Rosenblatt in October 1991 in the Dade County Circuit Court against cigarette manufacturers. The flight attendants sought damages for diseases caused by their long-term exposure to tobacco smoke in airline cabins.
FAMRI sponsors scientific and medical research on the prevention, early detection, and treatment of health problems caused by exposure to tobacco smoke. FAMRI also educates health care providers about diseases related to second-hand smoke.
In the first video clip above, flight attendant Leisa Sudderth, an original board member of FAMRI, describes becoming an activist for smokefree airlines. (01:19)
Press conference by airline flight attendants demanding that all domestic flights be non-smoking (03:38)
Hosted by John Banzhaf III, Founder, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH)
1989
“The flight attendants are dying and have died from the cigarette smoke they have been exposed to on the job…We are truly hostages at 35,000 feet.”
–Flight attendant Patty Young
“Up in Smoke: The Airline Flight Attendants’ Fight to End Smoking Aloft” (53 images)
Slide presentation by Alan Blum, MD at the 2004 annual conference of the Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute (FAMRI), Miami, Florida, and at the Flight Attendant Symposium at the Louis A, Turpin Aviation Museum at the San Francisco International Airport, November 30, 2004, depicting the parallel rise and glorification of air travel and cigarette smoking from the 1920s to the 1960s, the distribution of cigarettes to passengers by airlines, the introduction of smoking and no-smoking sections, and the 20-year effort by flight attendants for a smoke-free workplace, culminating in the passage by Congress of an airline smoking ban in 1988. Included are photographs of the leader of the battle, American Airlines flight attendant Patty Young; attorney Stanley Rosenblatt, who with his spouse Susan Rosenblatt, achieved a $300 million legal settlement with cigarette manufacturers that resulted in the creation of FAMRI; and Dr. Julius Richmond, a former surgeon General of the US Public Health Service and a leader of FAMRI’s medical advisory board. All images are of original items in the Center’s collection.
