Nine flights declare squawk 7700 emergency over Gatwick Airport - Details
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Nine flights declared emergency over Gatwick airport on Wednesday. Photograph: (Flightradar24)
Flightradar24 app sent nine emergency notifications one after the other from nine flights preparing to land at the Gatwick airport on Wednesday. Flights couldn't land because of a problem on the single runway at one of the world's busiest airports.
It was chaos at London Gatwick on Wednesday after nine flights preparing to land at the airport declared an emergency. The flights were forced to divert to other airports or enter holding patterns. The disruption affected hundreds of passengers, most of whom were coming from popular vacation spots. All of them declared a squawk 7700, the universal aviation transponder code used by pilots to signal a general in-flight emergency. The incident was triggered by a British Airways flight from Palma de Mallorca blocking a runway.
Affected flights at Gatwick
Flightradar24 confirmed that a total of 14 flights were diverted or circled over the airport before they could finally land at Gatwick after it reopened at about 1.30 am. According to reports, the affected flights were travelling from Tenerife, Valencia, Lanzarote, Rhodes and Athens in Greece, Bari and Rome in Italy, and Agadir in Morocco. They were diverted to London Luton, Stansted, Heathrow, and Birmingham airports. Those with the Flightradar24 app on their phones, would have received back-to-back squawk 7700 push notification alerts at the same time.
Passengers shared accounts of what they knew on social media. One of them, travelling from Tenerife, wrote, "Still on the plane to see what’s happening next !! Hoping we can be flown back to Gatwick soon! It’s been a much longer flight from Tenerife than usual." The plane on the runway was an Airbus A320 experiencing a technical issue.
The pilots couldn't operate the nose gear steering, which meant that the flight had to be towed to the gate. Incoming planes continued to be diverted for a long time, even after the British Airways flight was removed from the runway after 30 minutes.
London’s Gatwick Airport is the busiest airport with a single runway in the world. It handles more than 263,000 incoming and outgoing aircraft per year. Its main runway is 08R/26L, with o8L/26R acting as a backup runway.
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