Redditor Shares Old Plane Boarding Passes From 1996, Internet is Stunned

A reddit user shared a photo of two old boarding passes dated years back, revealing tickets from a "non-smoking" cabin. 

The user speculated the tickets might be from the pre-1980s period, leaving many internet users stunned to learn that planes once had separate cabins for smoking and non-smoking passengers.

The Reddit post showed the old boarding passes, which the user claimed fell out of a secondhand book they had bought. The passes were for a "non-smoking cabin" on a flight from London Heathrow to Casablanca, Morocco. 

The caption read, "I've tried looking everywhere online to see anything similar or to try to date them, as I'm so intrigued by how old they could be but had no luck finding anything!"

The user was curious if the tickets were from the 1980s, asking, "The non-smoking cabin is making me think maybe pre-1980s?! Any ideas, anyone? Thanks!"

Users had varied reactions to the viral post, shocked to discover that smoking was once allowed on flights. 

One user suggested the tickets were from 1996, stating, "Pretty confident this is 1996. You can check historical London Heathrow departures here, and on June 27, 1996, there was a flight RAM801, which corresponds to Royal Air Maroc and the shorter AT801 flight number. With what others have said, I'm pretty much certain this would be from 1996."

Another user explained that the tickets must have been from between 1955 and 2009, as they were for Heathrow's T2, which Air France stopped using after 2009. The comment read, "Well, they're for T2 at Heathrow, and Air France doesn't use the new T2, so it must be the old one, sometime between 1955 and 2009. AFSL is Air France Services Limited, which was also dissolved in 2009 and incorporated in 1996, which narrows it down a bit more. Furthermore, Air France stopped allowing smoking in 2000, so perhaps between 1996 and 2000. However, I recall buying air tickets that said 'non-smoking' on them long after smoking was banned. The whole plane was essentially a non-smoking section, and they just didn't update their ticketing system for a long time, so that may not be that useful."

A third user concluded, "After lots of research, it's an Air France boarding pass, and further research indicates that the style of these particular boarding passes was in use in the late 1990s. I feel I have narrowed it down to between 1990 and 1998, as before and after that, the boarding passes looked different, and after that, they stopped allowing smoking on all airlines, with Air France being the last in 2000.