of why are there ashtrays in the airbus a380?

Why are there ashtrays in the Airbus A380?: The Airbus A380, which landed in London this week, is being sold as the aircraft of the future. Sam Leith, who was on board, was struck more by an odd reminder of the past.

This brand-new cutting-edge plane has been constructed with built-in ashtrays – and, for that matter, wholly redundant, always-illuminated no-smoking signs. When I asked a spokesman for Singapore Airlines, he confessed that even the company's CEO had been baffled as to what they were doing there. The presence of ashtrays, he explained, is still – bizarrely – mandatory under one of the regulations of America's Federal Aviation Authority. If the A380 is the next step in the evolution of commercial travel, its ashtrays are its appendix; its coccyx; its vestigial tail.