Gatwick shuts down as 300 f lee blaze jet
A BLAZE on board a packed jet forced an emergency landing at Gatwick yesterday.
The 299 passengers and 13 crew on board were evacuated using escape slides in a drama that closed the airport for several hours.
Fifteen required hospital attention, many with suspected broken bones.
Scores of other flights had to be suspended, delaying thousands of passengers.
The Airbus A330 turned back just 15 minutes into its flight to Orlando in Florida as smoke began to fill the cabin. Some passengers accused the staff of panicking as the aircraft landed and its emergency chutes were deployed.
Liam Moore, a passenger, said everybody was ‘really shaken up’.
‘everything seemed fine,’ he said. ‘Then the pilot came on the tannoy just a few minutes into the flight and said we would have to do an emer-
‘The cabin crew made things worse’
gency landing. It all happened so quickly. We landed and suddenly all the doors flung open and the emergency slides were inflated.
‘We then had to slide down the chutes, some people got cuts and grazes from the slide.
‘Police cars were flying up the runway. There were four fire engines, paramedics, a helicopter.’
Fire crews used powerful extinguishers to douse the flames as the Airbus stood on the runway.
All flights at Gatwick were suspended, leaving thousands stranded and facing an afternoon of delays. The airport had been due to deal with 600 flights during the day. Passenger Tom Alridge said one of the cabin crew panicked after the plane touched down: ‘ She was screaming like a banshee – “Get off, get off” – she was literally pushing people down the chute,’ he said.
‘Someone has a broken ankle, another guy hit his head when he went down the chute.’
Another passenger, Mark Bell, from Bracknell, told the BBC: ‘I knew something was wrong when we took off. The plane was really wobbly.
‘The cabin crew made things worse. They were all really panicked. We weren’t told anything other than we had to go back to Gatwick and make an emergency landing.
‘We circled the airport twice before the landing. We were told to evacuate, evacuate, evacuate.’
The closure is the second to hit Gatwick in three days.
On Friday, all outbound flights were briefly suspended after a hot air balloon drifted into the flight path.
A Gatwick spokesman said: ‘A Virgin A330 left Gatwick at 11.48am bound for Orlando but returned to make an emergency landing at 12.30 due to reports of a technical issue.’
The spokesman said passengers were looked after at a reception area. Last night the airport was open again and flights were expected to be back on schedule today.
Steve Ridgway, chief executive of Virgin Atlantic, said the flight was ‘not far out of London when the technical alarms went off on the flight deck’.
he said some passengers had gone home and others were travelling today. he promised an investigation into the incident.