A Flexjet corporate flight, callsign FJ0646, left West Palm Beach for Beja in Portugal with six people on board, four of them crew. On 25 September the cockpit filled with smoke. The aeroplane landed at L.F. Wade International in Bermuda at about 11.47am. Fire crews met it, moved it to apron four and let the occupants off. Skyport closed the Causeway and Kindley Field Road for half an hour under its emergency plan. Passengers were put on another aircraft later. No authority has said what produced the smoke. That sentence is the whole public finding. The rest is how a long-range business jet is supposed to behave when the flight deck is no longer a place to breathe.
Smoke on the flight deck is treated as fire until it is not. The checklist is oxygen masks first, communication through the mask, isolate what can be isolated, then pick a field that can take the hull and the people. Mid-Atlantic, that field is often Bermuda where long enough runway, rescue cover, an airport used to odd jets dropping in. The crew’s ladder is short and ugly. Stay on the great circle toward Portugal with an unknown source, or spend the fuel and accept an island diversion that closes a road. They chose the island. Bermuda’s part is the other half of the system. ARFF already rolling, an isolation pad, a protocol that treats a six-soul corporate arrival like any other declared emergency.
What follows is quieter and harder. The operator must find the source, ferry or scrap the aeroplane, keep the next trip legal. Investigators will want the recorder, the maintenance history and whether a similar smell had been written up. Until that paper exists, 'safe landing' is the correct findings but an incomplete one. The test was whether the checklist, the alternate and the fire line still work when the cabin is a boardroom at 40,000 feet.