Originally Posted by MatJarosz

The pilot should have just stopped the plane and shut the engines for a couple of minutes. Surely they have a parking brake handle, right?

On a serious note, I've just gone into FR24 playback mode, and there were a couple of planes flying over the area, but neither seem to be BA. Qatar Cargo QR8291 was landing on 09R and Ryanair FR8975 was flying over to Stansted.

I was looking at 1500UTC which would have been 1600BST. OP is right re: BA242, but they forgot to mention Kenya KQ2100 ahead and Singapore SQ308 behind of the BA plane. I'd blame it on LHR air traffic if anyone, but the environmental conerns clearly outweight the 2mins of silence.