BA242 (MEX-LHR) breaks Duke of Edinburgh's funeral silence
 

Heathrow Airport announced on Friday that it was prohibiting planes from taking off or touching down for a six-minute period coinciding with the national one-minute silence at 3pm, which will mark the start of the service.

Pity that BA's 242 was one of two airline flying over whilst the silence was ending. It flew over the long drive at 15:02. Couldn't it have been put in a brief hold?

No the flight arrived in accordance with the rules applied by HMG, sorrry but you are wrong.

Is this for real?

Are you serious?

That’ll teach them to build a castle next to an airport!

:D

I have actually been asked this and yes they were American.

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.

Me too, in T5! By the same bright mind who, while waiting for the gate I was working on to open, read a Lonely Planet guide of Paris and proclaimed loudly to his wife “Some of these paintings are old”.

Obviously ‘Murican.

ATC facilitated this so that there was a GROUND STOP for the period. Hence the BA242 landed in accordance with the requested time period.

Tough crowd eh ....

Have there not been occasions in the past where ATC have routed aircraft away from Windsor at particular times during significant events ? Wasn’t this one such event ?

didnt Meghan and Harry get 15 minutes?

environmental concerns?

I can’t imagine it’d be that hard to do now. It’s not like there are loads of flights.

Easy enough to slow down during the initial descent rather than do a lap in the hold.

Not quite.. the Trents on the BA118 broke that silence!