London's Heathrow runways reopen after emergency

London: Both of Heathrow airport’s runways have reopened after a British Airways plane trailing smoke made an emergency landing on Friday morning, leading to a temporary shutdown and the cancellation of almost 200 flights.

The flight, heading to Oslo from Heathrow, returned to the airport shortly after taking off at 8.16am due to a technical fault. Airport officials initially shut both runways but soon reopened the southern strip. The northern runway was reopened at 10.45am.

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

One man who was working in a garden in Chelsea when the plane flew overheard said he feared something terrible was about to happen when he saw flames coming from the engine.

“It was very low and horrendous to watch,” a man named Jamie told Sky News. “It’s the kind of thing you see on Seconds from Disaster.

“There was loads of flames coming from the back of the right engine as it came over us. The noise was like a fighter jet [The engine] was on full fire when we saw it.”

Another witness, named only as Aiden, said he was driving to Heathrow and had to slow down as he was worried debris might fall from the plane.

He told LBC 97.3’s Nick Ferrari: “I thought to myself it was just the swirl of the wingtips and then I thought it was just too much for one side and I realised it was smoke. The plane’s coming right over the top of my head and I’ve had it.”

Emergency services arrived at the scene and 75 passengers and crew were safely evacuated on emergency slides. Three people were treated for minor injuries, according to the London ambulance service.

London fire brigade said a crew from Heathrow fire station assisted the airport’s fire service with an aircraft fire, which had been put out.

A Heathrow spokeswoman said 178 flights had been cancelled as a result of the incident. She added that departures were suffering an average delay of 22 minutes but the disruption to arrivals was within the normal range of about 15 minutes.

British Airways said it was caring for its customers and would be carrying out a full investigation into the incident, which will also be examined by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch.

Captain Mark Searle, chairman of airline pilots’ association Balpa, said: “This was a professional job done by professional people. As pilots we spend our whole career training to manage incidents such as this in order to avoid an incident becoming a disaster.