Swiss International Air Lines

Is Swiss safe?

Yes. Swiss International Air Lines has never written offHull lossAn accident in which an aircraft is destroyed or damaged beyond economic repair. People may or may not be hurt.More in the glossary an aircraft since it began flying in 2002, and it flies under Swiss and European oversight that is among the strictest anywhere. We score it 82. The score is lower than you might expect for a Swiss airline because of one event: a flight attendant died after an engine failure filled an Airbus A220 with smoke in December 2024. Under ICAO rules that is a fatal accident, and our rubric treats it as one.

Swiss is a big operation. With its sister airline Edelweiss it flew 163,908 flights in 2025 and carried 21.5 million passengers, according to the Lufthansa Group annual report. One death in that volume is a small rate. But it is recent, and the investigation is still open.

What happened on flight LX1885?

On 23 December 2024, flight LX1885 from Bucharest to Zurich was cruising at 40,000 feet over Austria when the crew got a warning about metal debris in the oil of the left engine, then high vibration. Smoke spread into the cockpit and cabin. The crew diverted to Graz and evacuated all 79 people on the runway. Two cabin crew members were taken to hospital with smoke inhalation, and one of them, a 23-year-old flight attendant who had collapsed after putting on a smoke hood, died on 30 December (ASN).

An interim report, obtained by the Swiss newspaper Blick and summarised by Travelnews in March 2025, said the failed engine had been fitted in July 2024, that its maintenance records showed nothing unusual, and that the cockpit could not reach the cabin by interphone during the emergency. The engine was sent to the US for examination. We found no final report by October 2026. The open questions are why the engine failed, how smoke got into the air system, and why the smoke hood did not protect the crew member.

The A220 engine problem

LX1885 was not the first time Swiss A220s had engine trouble. In the summer and autumn of 2019 its A220s had three uncontained failures of the Pratt & Whitney PW1524G engine, in which parts broke out of the engine casing. After the third, on 15 October 2019 on flight LX359 from London Heathrow to Geneva, Swiss grounded all 29 of its A220s for inspections. Transport Canada then limited engine thrust above 29,000 feet by emergency airworthiness directive.

All three flights landed safely, and the fix worked: Swiss has flown the A220 since then without a repeat of those failures. But the PW1500G family is also caught up in Pratt & Whitney's powder-metal defect recall. Lufthansa's 2025 annual report says four to six Swiss A220s were out of service at any time for early engine overhauls, and that Swiss would park its nine A220-100s and fly only the larger A220-300s into 2026.

What about Swissair and Crossair?

Swissair 111, the MD-11 that crashed off Nova Scotia in 1998 and killed 229 people, was flown by a different company. Swiss was formed in 2002 from Crossair, Swissair's regional subsidiary, after Swissair collapsed. Crossair's last fatal crash, an Avro RJ100 that hit a hill on approach to Zurich on 24 November 2001 with 24 of 33 people killed, came months before the new airline started flying and is outside our 20-year window.

How old is the Swiss fleet?

Mixed. At the end of 2025 Swiss and Edelweiss flew 116 aircraft: 30 A220s, 47 A320-family jets, 14 A330-300s, 8 A340-300s, 12 Boeing 777-300ERs and 5 new Airbus A350-900s. The A220s, 777s and A320neos are current designs. The A340s, some more than 20 years old, are the oldest; the A350s that joined from 2025 are replacing them, with ten planned by 2029. Swiss does not publish an average age; the Lufthansa Group as a whole averaged 14.4 years.

Flying Swiss: what to check

• Look at "operated by". LX flight numbers are also flown by Helvetic Airways (Embraer E-jets) and by other wet-lease partners when A220s are parked. They have their own certificates; Edelweiss flights carry WK numbers.
• On long-haul routes, the aircraft type tells you the age. The A350 and 777 are the newest; the A340 is the oldest Swiss widebody.
• Read the smoke hood card. LX1885 is a reminder that crews, not passengers, wear smoke hoods, and that in smoke the fastest way out is the exit you counted rows to before take-off.

How we scored it

Strong oversight (92) and a clean hull-loss record carry Swiss, but the 2024 death holds the accident score at 79, the same band as Singapore Airlines after its 2024 turbulence death. A mixed fleet (74) and the A220 engine history (78) put Swiss at 82, below its parent Lufthansa (87).