Tragic Loss: Young Flight Attendant Dies After Heroic Efforts During In-Flight Smoke Emergency Just Before Christmas
- Colleagues are said to have been left in the "deepest shock and grief" after the unexpected death of a young flight attendant. Attention is shifting towards special breathing equipment which was meant to protect the crew member.
A young flight attendant working for Swiss International Airlines has succumbed to injuries he sustained during an emergency incident onboard an Airbus A220 just before Christmas when smoke suddenly started to fill the passenger cabin without warning.
Colleagues are said to be distraught at the news that the well-liked crew member has died after spending days fighting for his life in intensive care in an Austrian hospital with his family at his bedside.
In a statement, the chief executive of Swiss, Jens Fehlinger, said the entire airline was “devastated at our dear colleague’s death” and that his loss had “left us all in the deepest shock and grief.”
“Our thoughts are with his family, whose pain we cannot imagine. I offer them my heartfelt condolences on behalf of all of us at SWISS,” Fehlinger continued.
The crew member had to be airlifted to hospital on December 23 after flight LX1885 from Bucharest to Zurich made an emergency landing in the Austrian city of Graz due to the so-called ‘smoke, fire or fume’ event aboard the Airbus A220.
As smoke filled the cabin, the flight attendant rushed to help passengers by putting on a special ‘smoke hood’ that is meant to supply a fresh supply of oxygen to the wearer while they search for the source of the smoke and fight a potential fire.
The crew member, however, collapsed and had to be rushed to the hospital, where doctors battled to save his life for nearly a week.
The chief operating officer of SWISS, Oliver Buchhofer, praised the emergency services in Graz for their swift response to the emergency incident but said the airline has “many questions, and we want them answered.”
Although the cause of the smoke is yet to be established, suspicion is falling on the Pratt and Whitney engines that power the Airbus A220, with preliminary investigations suggesting some technical issue with one of the two engines.
All 74 passengers aboard the plane had to be evacuated via emergency slides from the seven-year-old aircraft. Ten passengers and two other crew members had to be transported to hospital for injuries sustained during the emergency – many of which are connected to the smoke in the cabin.
Late last week, SWISS said a focus of the investigation was on the smoke hoods that cabin crew wear during inflight emergencies.
In 2023, Swiss announced that it was working to urgently replace more than 1,000 smoke hoods after discovering that one of two types of smoke hood used by the airline had ‘partially limited’ functionality.
The hoods are correctly known as ‘protective breathing equipment’ or PBE for short and act in a similar way to the breathing equipment that firefighters wear by supplying a fresh supply of oxygen to crew members dealing with a smoke or fume event.
The airline has yet to confirm whether the events onboard flight LX1885 are in any way connected to the smoke hood issues first detected in 2023.
