Put It Out
On this day, January 4, in 1998, Dr. Abid Hanson died while on a flight from Cairo, Egypt to New York City. After repeatedly asking the flight attendants to move him to one of the empty seats in the front of the plane, away from the airplane's smoking section that began three rows behind him, and being denied, he subsequently died from his asthma due to prolonged exposure to secondhand smoke. His family sued the airline, Olympic Airways, which was found liable for his death in a case upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court (PDF), and led to the ban on in-flight smoking on U.S. domestic flights.
Image: juicyrai (Flickr)
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