"David Cartwright" writes:
"Marco Leon" mmleon(at)yahoo.com wrote
Hmmm, maybe they're on to something. When was the last time you had a
"general run-of-the-mill" consumer product start smoking on you?? ;-)

Oh, I've had a couple recently. My dad bought an electric light that
contained a transformer, which did the blue smoke thing, and the CD-ROM
drive in my sister's PC did the same the other week (I've had them fail, but
never in a combusting kind of way!). And I've lost count of the number of
power supplies in computer equipment that have exuded smoke over the years.

I've had numerous power supply failures in (ground-based)
devices over the years and have never had any smoke from
any of them. They just quit working...

There is a difference between linear and switching power
supplies. The latter are most likely going to fail
quietly whereas the former can very well smoke something
when they fail.

A thought occurs to me regarding avionics failures: The
confined environment of small airplane cabins and the
close proximity to the avionics devices may cause the
even a miniscule amount of odor to be noticed whereas
on the ground nobody may be close at the time of failure
and any odor goes unnoticed.