A few months after the Swissair crash, I experienced a tense couple of seconds when noticing a sudden strong burning odour on the flightdeck of our MD-11. That happened in IMC at an altitude of about 16000 feet, during descent into YVR.
We were about to declare an emergency when we cleared the clouds, seeing a huge forest fire some miles to our right with lots of firefighting efforts (waterbombers, etc.) going on.
Sure would have been nice if someone had warned us in advance!
