This story was updated on Wednesday, May 21, 2025, at 4:17 p.m.
The smoke that filled the cabin of a Delta flight as it took off from the Atlanta airport in February was so thick that the lead flight attendant had trouble seeing past the first row of passengers and the pilots donned oxygen masks as a precaution.
The National Transportation Safety Board said in a preliminary report Wednesday that the plane quickly returned to the airport on the morning of Feb. 24 and evacuated all 99 people aboard. Two people sustained minor injuries during the evacuation, but no one was hurt by the smoke.
Initially, the airline described the incident as just a haze inside the Boeing 717 aircraft. A Delta spokesman said he couldn’t comment during the NTSB’s ongoing investigation that the airline is cooperating with.
The flight attendants reported that the smoke began near one of the doors in the front of the plane before it also started coming out of all the vents throughout the plane, according to the report. The flight attendants tried contacting the pilots but initially couldn’t reach them because they were focused on emergency procedures and flying the plane.
