World

Cabin Smoke Forces Down Jet

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

August 25, 2000 / 5:27 PM EDT / CBS

Smoke inside an American Airlines Boeing 767 carrying 172 people caused the plane to make an unscheduled landing Friday at a Newfoundland airport. There were no reports of any injuries.

The flight, en route from London to New York, landed safely about 5:30 p.m., said Larry Pittman, manager of the Goose Bay Airport.

"The pilot reported smoke in the cockpit," Pittman said. "He made a precautionary landing and everything is OK now."

According to Pittman, the pilot reported the smoke about an hour before the plane landed. A statement from the airline said an unspecified electrical problem caused "some smoke in the passenger cabin."

It wasn't immediately clear why there was a discrepancy on the location of the smoke.

The statement said Flight 131 had 160 passengers and 12 crew members aboard.

The airline said another Boeing 767 would be sent to Goose Bay to pick up the passengers, and the original plane would be inspected before being returning to the United States.

Goose Bay, about 500 miles north of Halifax in the Labrador region of Newfoundland in northeast Canada, is the location of one of the eastern Canadian airports commonly used for unscheduled or emergency landings by trans-Atlantic flights.

Planes experiencing technical difficulties or in some cases, needing to remove unruly passengers, often make unscheduled stops in eastern Canada before or after crossing the Atlantic Ocean.