PHOTOS: Plane On Fire Flies Over London, Makes Emergency Landing

plane

A British Airways plane trailing smoke made an emergency landing on Friday morning at Heathrow, leading to a temporary shutdown of the airport and the cancellation of hundreds of flights.

The flight, heading to Oslo from Heathrow, returned to the London airport shortly after taking off at 8.16am because of what BA called a technical fault but what was described by witnesses as an engine on fire.

Emergency services met the plane on the runway and 75 passengers and crew were safely evacuated on emergency slides. Three people were treated for minor injuries, the London ambulance service said.

The London fire brigade said a fire on the aircraft was put out.

BA is to investigate the incident in conjunction with the Air Accidents Investigation Branch.

BA cancelled all its short-haul flights in and out of Heathrow until 4pm on Friday to avert widespread backlogs and delays. With the airport operating at full capacity, there is little scope to make up for time lost in runway closures. BA had been expecting its busiest day of the bank holiday period with 128,000 passengers due to travel.

Witnesses under the flightpath saw flames and smoke coming from the Airbus A319 as it came in to land over west London.

David Gallagher, a passenger on the flight, told BBC News: “About eight or nine minutes into the flight there was a loud popping sound – not an explosion but definitely not usual sounds.

“There was some concern from passengers – people gasping and louder exclamations. The captain came on very calmly, said he was aware of the situation and that everything was running normally and he was going to run some tests to see what the right course would be.

“Another five minutes after that there was a loud sound, and this time the right engine was clearly on fire. I mean, big flames, very visible from the rest of the cabin and lots of black smoke.”

Pictures taken from inside the plane also showed an inspection cover loose on the left-hand engine.

David Learmount, operations and safety editor of Flight Global publication, said: “Most likely there was external damage to both engines. Damage of this kind is consistent with a bird strike, although at this stage we don’t know what happened.”

Bird strikes are a serious problem for aircraft and have been known to bring planes down.

Fire damage to the right engine as the plane is towed away

The other engine seen from inside the plane