While the insides of aircraft aren’t known for smelling like roses - especially after a 12-hour turbulence-filled jaunt across the continents - it turns out that some odours even give pilots pause. According to 20 Minuten, a SWISS flight from Zurich to New York was forced to declare an emergency on the evening of July 11 because of a weird smell in the cockpit. The flight was then diverted to Paris.
Transatlantic flight from Switzerland to US safely diverted to Paris
After a 47-minute delay on the ground, flight LX18 to Newark Airport took off safely towards the Big Apple at 6.07pm on July 11. Once they had left the ground at the Swiss airport, the Airbus A330-343 started to make its journey across Europe, the Atlantic and then North America, with an estimated flight time of eight hours and five minutes.
However, family and friends who were tracking the plane from New York and Zurich soon noticed that as the flight passed over east London, the plane made a sudden near-180-degree turn back towards the Swiss city. After a few nervous minutes, it was confirmed that the plane was making an emergency diversion to Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, where it landed safely just after 8pm.
Unknown odour causes SWISS flight to declare emergency
So why did the pilots suddenly decide to turn the plane around? According to SWISS spokesperson Michael Steif, LX18 declared an emergency as it flew over the British capital because the pilot had started to notice a strange and unusual smell in the cockpit. While it sounds innocuous, bad smells can be a good indicator that there is a fault somewhere in the plane, and out of an abundance of caution, most pilots choose to land if the smell persists.
Steif explained that “the pilot decided to land to be on the safe side," and chose to land at the next available opportunity, which turned out to be in Paris. He added that SWISS will now be providing accommodation and alternative connections to affected passengers.
Bad smells and SWISS flights don't mix
This incident joins a strangely long history of events at SWISS where a bad smell has forced their planes to land. Similar incidents have occurred on flights in August and October 2022 - although it must be noted that these incidents involved smaller planes.
Questions also remain regarding what the smell actually was, with SWISS yet to reveal the source of the bad odour. However, in a separate and similar incident in 2021, pilots told Air Live that the odour emitting from the cockpit smelt like "dirty socks" - so whether the diversion was caused by a technical fault or by the pilot failing to do their laundry, remains to be seen.
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