A Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Gothenburg, Sweden, was forced to make an emergency diversion on Saturday afternoon when the cabin started to fill with smoke from a coffee machine at the front of the plane that had overheated.
Lufthansa flight LH818 was being operated by a 27-year-old Airbus A319, although hopefully, the coffee machine in the front galley wasn’t as old as the rest of the plane.
According to accident analysts, The Aviation Herald, the aircraft was still in its initial ascent after takeoff from Frankfurt Am Main Airport at around 4:50 pm on Saturday when smoke suddenly started to billow from the front galley into the passenger cabin.
The pilots decided to immediately divert to Hamburg where they landed safely just 14 minutes later. Once on the ground, engineers were able to identify the defective coffee machine as the reason behind the emergency.
There are a number of reasons behind so-called ‘smoke, fire and fume events’ onboard commercial airlines, although the vast majority are caused by issues in the galley.
Often, the ovens are to blame, or, at the very least, something in the ovens. When smoke is detected in the galley, flight attendants are trained to pull easy-access circuit breakers that kill power to all of the electrical equipment in the galley.
In other cases, fume events have been linked to the air conditioning system and, in the case of the Airbus A320 family, fumes from the engine being sucked into the aircraft and contaminating the air conditioning.
In this latest incident, there were no reports of any injuries, and the passengers completed their journey on a new aircraft. The affected airplane remained in Hamburg overnight before returning to Franfurt the following morning.
