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On Monday, a SWISS Airbus A330 flying from Zurich to New York JFK diverted to Bangor, Maine, after smoke was reported in the forward section of the Business Class cabin. Two days on, we now know what caused it – a headphones charging case.
What happened
Flight LX16 departed Zurich for New York JFK on Monday 27 July with 208 passengers on board. The A330, registered HB-JHK, was around six and a half hours into the flight and cruising at 32,000 feet when the pilots requested an immediate diversion after smoke appeared in the forward Business Class cabin.
Data from Flight Radar 24 showed the aircraft descending more than 22,000 feet in just 10 minutes with the plane landing safely at Bangor International Airport at around 15:15 UTC.
Fire crews at Bangor carried out a thermal and visual inspection, discovered no fire, and all passengers and crew were confirmed safe.
The cause
SWISS sent a technical team to Bangor and says it has already identified the cause: “a standard commercially available storage case that also charges the headphones using a power bank function” slipped into a seat and became jammed.
The pressure on the case damaged the device, which then heated up, produced smoke, and promptly inconvenienced the airline, the crew and over 200 passengers.
The airline has used the incident to restate its power bank policy which has been in place since the start of 2026:
- Power banks can no longer be used to charge devices on board
- Charging a power bank itself is also not permitted
- Passengers may bring up to two power banks each, but these must be kept on the person, in the seat pocket, or in a carry-on stowed under the seat
- Power banks cannot go in checked baggage or the overhead bin
- The same rules apply to e-cigarettes
It has also pointed out that …
“In the safety video before departure, we explicitly instruct our passengers to inform the cabin crew immediately if an electronic device becomes hot, emits smoke, is damaged or is lost under the seat”
Furthermore, SWISS has pushed back on reports describing the incident as a fire in the cockpit, saying there was smoke, and only smoke, in the forward Business Class cabin. It said the FAA corrected an earlier report that had suggested otherwise (apparently some outlets don’t think smoke in a passenger cabin is dramatic enough, so make things up).
Quick thoughts
A readily available charging case, not even a full power bank, was enough to trigger a diversion on a transatlantic flight and a runway inspection by fire crews, and it feels like we’re seeing more and more incidents like this.
Annoyingly, short of banning these kinds of chargers/devices altogether (which would seem heavy handed and unworkable) I’m not sure what more airlines can do to stop incidents like this from happening … but it doesn’t help when passengers don’t report missing devices or fail to notice when a device is missing.
I wonder how much this diversion has cost SWISS? At a guess, this wasn’t a cheap incident to deal with.
An aside: It hasn’t been a quiet year for HB-JHK. Per PYOK, the same aircraft was involved in a rejected takeoff and emergency evacuation at Delhi in April, after a Rolls-Royce Trent engine failed on the runway. It returned to service on 4 June.
Bottom line
It turns out that the smoke in the cabin that caused LX16 to divert to Bangor (Maine) a few days ago wasn’t as a result of an aircraft issue, but down to a careless passenger.
A passenger in the aircraft’s Business Class cabin lost their headphone charger inside a seat’s mechanism and when the mechanism moved, the pressure on the case caused the battery within it to overheat and to emit smoke.
I wonder how that passenger now feels?
