British Airways Flight Plunges 28,000 Feet, Makes Emergency Landing Back at Heathrow
British Airways flight BA295 dropped from 37,000 feet to 9,000 feet over Ireland on Monday, declared an emergency, and limped back to Heathrow — where passengers say it touched down on just three of its five wheel sets. British Airways is still only calling it a "technical issue."
British Airways flight BA295 never made it across the Atlantic on Monday — and the landing told a stranger story than the descent.
The Boeing 777-200ER, registration G-VIIA, departed London Heathrow's Terminal 5 at around 11:50 a.m. bound for Chicago O'Hare. About an hour into the flight, over Ireland, it fell from its cruising altitude of roughly 37,000 feet to about 9,000 feet in a matter of minutes and squawked 7700 — the international transponder code for a general emergency.
That descent profile is textbook for one thing: a suspected cabin pressurization problem. When pilots believe the cabin may be losing pressure, the standard move is a rapid descent to around 10,000 feet, where the air is thick enough to breathe without supplemental oxygen. Passenger photos from the cabin, showing oxygen masks hanging down, point the same way. Below 10,000 feet, people can breathe without them — which is exactly where the crew took the plane.
The crew then turned back toward Britain instead of continuing over the Atlantic, and spent hours circling over the Bristol Channel — burning fuel so the heavy long-haul jet would be light enough to land safely. It touched down back at Heathrow around 5 p.m. Fire trucks met it on the runway. No injuries were reported, and passengers disembarked normally.
That's when the story took its second turn. According to passengers on board, the plane landed on just three of its five wheel sets — a landing-gear problem, not (or not only) a pressurization one. One passenger said the captain told them there had been a "technical fault" with the aircraft, and that travelers were asked to exit slowly and from the rear of the plane so as not to tip it. Another confirmed the same account: three wheels on the ground, disembarking from the back.
British Airways has not confirmed any of that. The airline's official line remains a bare "technical issue" — the captain's "technical fault" to passengers is the most anyone in uniform has said. No cause for the descent has been confirmed, and no one at the airline has said whether depressurization, a gear malfunction, or both were behind the emergency.
The flight-tracking data and the passenger accounts agree on the sequence, even if the airline won't fill in the why: a steep emergency descent, hours of fuel-burning over southwest England, a safe landing at Heathrow with emergency crews standing by — and a jet that came to a stop missing two of its five wheel sets. Everyone walked off. The plane did not.