A packed Delta Air Lines plane made an emergency landing at Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport and evacuated onto the runway in February after a ‘tremendous’ amount of smoke filled the cabin shortly after takeoff, a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has revealed.
The haze in the cabin was so thick that the lead flight attendant told accident investigators he couldn’t see past the first few rows of seats as smoke suddenly started “coming out of all the vents.”
Delta flight DL876 departed Atlanta at around 9:00 am on February 24, bound for Columbia Metropolitan Airport (CAE), but within minutes of being airborne, both the cockpit and cabin had filled with a thick grey smoke.
As the plane was still in its initial takeoff phase, flight attendants at both the front and rear of the Boeing 717 aircraft attempted to call the pilots using an emergency alert button on their jumpseat phones to alert them to what was happening in the cabin.
When the pilots didn’t answer the phone, the flight attendants even tried to alert the pilots by making public address announcements over the cabin speakers–which cannot only sometimes be heard in the cockpit but is often intermixed with other communications in the pilot’s headset.
Without any response from the pilots, the lead flight attendant knocked on the cockpit to try to alert them to what was going on in the cabin, but by this point, the smoke had already filled the flight deck, and the pilots were putting on special breathing apparatus.
Understandably, the pilots said they decided to prioritize flying the plane at the critical point of takeoff rather than focusing on communicating with the flight attendants, although they were aware of what was happening in the cabin.
As the pilots declared an emergency, warning signals lit up in the cockpit, including the master caution light and a smoke detector alarm in the forward lavatory.
With no initial response from the pilots, the flight attendants sought to calm the nerves of the jittery passengers, telling them that they were aware of and trained to deal with this type of incident.
One off-duty flight attendant who was traveling in a passenger seat quickly moved to an emergency exit row to help if an evacuation became necessary.
After safely landing back at Atlanta Hartsfield, the plane came to a stop on the runway and was surrounded by fire trucks. The Captain opened the flight deck door to assess the situation and was struck by the “tremendous” amount of smoke in the cabin.
An evacuation was immediately ordered, and the 94 passengers onboard escaped the 25-year-old plane via emergency slides.
Following the incident, a spokesperson for Delta said: “The flight crew followed procedures to return to Atlanta when a haze inside the aircraft was observed after departure.”
“Nothing is more important than the safety of our customers and people, and we apologize to our customers for the experience.”
