UPDATED: Passengers who had just boarded a Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) flight at Oslo’s main airport at Gardermoen had to jump onto its evacuation slides Tuesday morning after the cockpit and cabin started filling with smoke.
The flight, which was bound for Brussels, was evacuated just before 8:30am. “It’s a flight that had boarded from Gate 10,” Joachim Westher Andersen of Oslo Lufthavn Gardermoen (OSL) told VG. The jetway out to the flight was pulled back, the aircraft was towed away from the terminal and all 163 passengers on board were ordered to evacuate. Slides were used both in the fore and aft portions of the aircraft.
A passenger on board the flight, Tarjei Rødset, told VG that smoke started filling the cockpit when the motors were started. The smoke quickly seeped into the main cabin as well.
“It had a sour gas smell that burned in the throat,” Rødset told VG. He said there was no panic on board the flight and passengers evacuated in a relatively calm manner. “The doors were opened and the evacuation slides came out,” he said.
An SAS spokesman said the flight involved was SK 4743 bound for Brussels. Passengers and crew were bussed away from the aircraft, which was quickly surrounded by emergency vehicles, reported Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK).
Andersen told TV2 that passengers and crew were assembled for a debriefing and orientation of what happened, and how their disrupted travel plans would be addressed. He said the evacuation followed standard procedures and there were no injuries.
He later told NRK that the SAS passengers were offered a new flight to Brussels later in the morning. The source of the smoke and what caused it hadn’t been determined. The incident did not disrupt traffic at the airport and Andersen said there were no other flight delays related to it.
newsinenglish.no/Nina Berglund
