Smoke scare on IndiGo flight

The incident took place on Monday evening on the 6E-237 flight, being operated by an A-320neo aircraft. The plane made an emergency landing at the Kolkata airport.

"There was smoke everywhere. And it was getting thicker by the minute... At one stage, it was so strong, that our eyes started to hurt," NDTV quoted Subhomoy Halder, a 16-year-old who was on the flight. He said the smoke appeared around 25 minutes before landing.

"The pilot had announced that the flight was about to land. Then I smelt something burning and the cabin was looking foggy," he said,

"Our flight 6E-237 on Dec 10, operating on Jaipur-Kolkata route made an emergency landing due to suspected smoke in the cabin. All passengers and crew onboard are safe. There was no earlier report of any malfunction with the airplane," IndiGo tweeted.

"The smoke development was due to oil leakage going through the air system" NDTV quoted the airline as saying. "There was no fire on board."

Passengers in the back of the Airbus, including Subhamoy and his parents, had to be evacuated through the emergency chute at Kolkata airport. 

This is the latest in a series of problems concerning the A-320neo equipped with new generation Pratt and Whitney engines designed to provide unprecedented fuel efficiency, the report said. In March this year, India's aviation watchdog, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, had grounded 11 plane of this model, eight of which were IndiGo aircraft.