Austrian Airlines Flight To Vienna Suffers Smoke Onboard

An Austrian Airlines flight bound for Vienna had to return to Frankfurt minutes after departure due to smoke onboard the aircraft.

Incident: Austrian Airlines Flight To Vienna Suffers Smoke Onboard…

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Austrian Airlines flight OS208 is a routine scheduled flight between Frankfurt am Main International Airport and Vienna, with the affected rotation being operated by OE-LBI.

As per data from Planespotters.net, OE-LBI is a 21.0 year old Airbus A320-200 that originally started out life with Eurofly back in March 2003.

By February 2010, the aircraft was handed over to Meridiana Fly, before being handed over to Macquarie AirFinance in July 2012 and then the current carrier by September.

Of the A320-200 variant, the carrier has 29 of them in the fleet, of which 27 are in active service and two are currently parked, offering an average fleet age of 18.9 years.

Austrian Airlines flight OS208 departed Frankfurt at 1338 local time on December 21 and proceeded initially towards Vienna.

As per The Aviation Herald, the aircraft then turned back to the German airport amid reports of smoke on board.

It is understood that the smell of kerosene had been observed onboard by the crew, but the smoke source came from the APU.

OE-LBI remained grounded as a result of this incident for around 18 hours before returning to service thereafter.

Such repairs were made by the relevant maintenance teams and managed to turn around the aircraft in good time to ensure loss of revenue was minimised on the aircraft.