A Delta Air Lines flight bound for South Carolina was forced to return to Atlanta on Monday morning when “haze” filled the cabin — just two days after a hauntingly similar mishap diverted another Delta flight to Los Angeles.
Delta Flt. 876 was in the air with 99 passengers and crew on board around 8:30 a.m. when the pilot turned the Boeing 717 around and landed back at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
Everyone was evacuated on emergency slides, Fox5 in Atlanta said. There were no reported injuries.
“We are being evacuated off the plane,” a passenger said in a video of the midair mishap posted by 11Alive News. “I recorded the whole time. I recorded the evacuation, smoke and all.”
Footage taken before the plane returned to Atlanta shows passengers covering their noses inside the hazy cabin.
“The flight crew followed procedures to return to Atlanta when haze inside the aircraft was observed after departure,” a Delta rep said in a statement.
“Nothing is more important than the safety of our customers and people, and we apologize to our customers for the experience.”
The Federal Aviation Administration said it would investigate.
The incident marks the third recent such situation involving a Delta flight, including one involving an Airbus A350-900 bound for Australia that had to return to Los Angeles on Saturday when smoke was detected on board with 162 passengers.
Last week, another Delta flight flipped upside-down and burst into flames after landing at Toronto Pearson Airport in a shocking caught-on-video accident.
Miraculously, all crew and passengers on that flight, which had departed Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, survived the frightening crash.
Delta offered passengers on the flipped flight $30,000 each in compensation, but near-tragedy could cost the airline much more — the first lawsuits from the crash have already been filed.
