Nine passenger aircraft circling above London simultaneously declared emergencies in the early hours of Wednesday morning after a British Airways Airbus A320 suffered an apparent landing gear failure on the single operational runway at Gatwick Airport, blocking all arrivals and leaving dozens of inbound flights from across Europe with nowhere to land as their fuel reserves steadily drained.
The cascading crisis unfolded after British Airways flight BA2673, arriving from Palma de Mallorca in Spain, touched down at Gatwick at approximately 12:50 a.m. but was left stranded on the runway when emergency services rushed to respond to the stricken aircraft.
Reports from passengers on diverted flights, including one whose husband was aboard an affected plane, indicated the BA jet’s landing gear failed on touchdown, leaving the runway coated in fuel and requiring fire engines and ground vehicles to hold the area as engineers worked to remove the disabled aircraft.
As per the authorities, the disruption began late Tuesday after British Airways Flight 2673 arrived from Palma de Mallorca, Spain. The Airbus A320 had been scheduled to land at 11:50 p.m., but an emergency response kept the aircraft on the runway.
Nine Aircraft Squawk 7700 as Holding Patterns Become Untenable
With Gatwick’s main runway blocked and the airport’s northern runway available only as a standby facility under normal operations, inbound aircraft from across Europe were forced into extended holding patterns over southern England, burning through fuel reserves at a rate that left crews with no alternative but to declare emergencies and seek clearance to divert.
The nine flights, originating from across Europe, “squawked” the emergency code 7700, likely for low fuel. The Squawk 7700 code is the internationally recognised transponder signal pilots use to alert air traffic controllers that an aircraft requires immediate assistance or priority handling.
Controllers receiving the code are required to give the transmitting aircraft absolute priority for landing, but with Gatwick’s runway still blocked, that priority could only be translated into urgent diversion clearances to nearby airports.
The jets which sent out the emergency signals included flights from locations in Spain, including Tenerife, Valencia, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. Flights were also diverted from Rhodes and Athens in Greece, Bari and Rome in Italy, and Agadir in Morocco.
The affected airlines included multiple easyJet services, flights from Agadir, Valencia, Fuerteventura, Athens and Rome among them, alongside additional British Airways flights. In all, fourteen flights were ultimately diverted, with most heading to London Stansted Airport in Essex or London Luton Airport in Bedfordshire, both of which activated additional ground handling resources to manage the sudden influx of diverted aircraft arriving in quick succession through the early hours of Wednesday morning.
Passengers Stranded Far From Home
For the hundreds of passengers aboard the nine aircraft that squawked emergencies, the disruption translated into a deeply disorienting night of uncertainty. One passenger aboard British Airways flight BA2703, diverted from its Tenerife-Gatwick service to Stansted, described the confusion of landing more than an hour’s drive from their intended destination in the middle of the night.
“Hoping we can be flown back to Gatwick soon. It’s been a much longer flight from Tenerife than usual,” the passenger wrote on social media. Passengers on the ground at Gatwick meanwhile reported being kept aboard departure aircraft in long queues on taxiways as the runway closure froze departures as well as arrivals, with some passengers ordered off their planes entirely as the scale of the disruption became clear.
How a Single Runway Makes Gatwick Uniquely Vulnerable?
Although Gatwick has two runways, it normally operates with one primary runway. The northern runway mainly serves as a standby facility and is generally used for taxiing or during exceptional circumstances. Because of this operational setup, any incident blocking the main runway can significantly affect arriving and departing traffic, leading to holding patterns, diversions and delays.
That structural vulnerability has been a source of recurring debate among UK aviation planners, who have argued for decades about whether Gatwick’s northern runway should be brought into operational use as a means of building resilience into what is effectively one of the world’s busiest single-runway airports.
The airport handles more than 46 million passengers annually, the highest volume of any single-runway airport on the planet, leaving it with virtually no buffer capacity when its primary runway becomes unavailable.
The British government conditionally approved bringing the northern runway into full use in 2024, but that project remains years from completion.
Runway Reopened, Backlog Builds
Gatwick eventually reopened its runway around 1 am, with incoming jets now able to land. British Airways and easyJet both issued travel disruption notices to affected passengers, advising those diverted to Stansted or Luton that onward transport arrangements to Gatwick were being coordinated.
Airlines indicated that passengers on the nine affected flights should expect significant further delays before reaching their original destination airport, with buses and coaches among the options being arranged for passengers whose flights had landed at the wrong airport in the middle of the night.
Gatwick Airport declined to provide detailed comment on the cause of the BA2673 incident, confirming only that normal operations had resumed and advising passengers to check with their airlines for updated information.
British Airways similarly had not issued a formal statement on what caused the Airbus A320 to become disabled on the runway. Aviation investigators have the power under UK law to open a safety investigation into any incident involving an emergency landing and runway incapacitation, and a formal review of Tuesday night’s events is expected to be announced in the coming days.
