Twenty-five years ago Wednesday, a new federal law banned smoking on nearly every domestic flight, a key step in the continuing struggle to improve public health by reducing smoking and exposure to it.

The law which took effect on Feb. 25, 1990 banned smoking on all domestic flights of less than six hours, or on all but 28 of 16,000 domestic flights. Bitterly resisted by the tobacco industry, it was at the time among the most visible indications of the impact of the 1964 surgeon general’s report that identified smoking’s myriad detrimental impacts on public health.

Feb. 25 “is an important anniversary because it established a precedent that airline cabins were an environment not to have smoking,” said Dave Dobbins, chief operating officer of Legacy, an anti-smoking advocacy group. “That provided a model for understanding that this could be done in other places as well.

“By the mid-1990s, the airlines came to understand that the vast majority of their passengers liked this change, which was funny because people thought that was impossible – until it happened” Dobbins said. “The majority of people who didn’t have a voice figured out how much better the air quality was when smoking went away.”

In 1995 Delta made all flights including international flights smoke-free. Over time the rest of the domestic industry as well as the global industry followed. That outcome “established a precedent for taking the smoke-free movement much farther,” Dobbins said. “Without it, we wouldn’t have had smoke-free restaurants and smoke-free workplaces.”

This is not to say that the airline industry initially embraced the concept of smoke-free cabins. Rather, it moved slowly, acting in an environment where tobacco companies exerted immense influence on a public debate that highly valued the concept of “smoker’s rights.”

Airlines were more followers than leaders, Dobbins said. But “they came around after the legislation passed.”

Historically, the first sign of change after the 1964 report came in 1971, when United created a smoking section in its cabins. That was good, Dobbins said, because United “acknowledged that the health problem existed,” but at the same time, “somebody said a smoking section on an airplane is like a peeing section in a swimming pool – it has a limited effect......