I'm curious to hear whether it is normal behaviour of airlines to continue to show flights as "en-route" and on-time when the plane has clearly suffered a loss of cabin pressure, and returned to point of origin, and landed.

Just watched AA45 return to CDG after about 1 hour, and has been on the ground for nearly 30 minutes but aa.com continues to show it as in-flight and on-time.

A return to field (RTF) requires that someone manually build a new segment onto AA45's original line of flight. Since it was normally routed CDG-XXX, now it's routed CDG-CDG-XXX. Sounds trivial, but until someone actually builds the new segment (and gives it ETDs, ship number, crew, etc.) then the website, and other sites won't be able to display it correctly. The primary goal in a RTF is to get the plane on the ground. Secondary is planning the service recovery. If they don't immediately know when an A/C or crew will be available, it may take some time.

If a flight is really in trouble (i.e. an accident), then yes, the airline internally locks down all access to flight info to a very small group so that (por ejemplo) Joe Agent can't download the pax list and sent it to CNN.

Have a source of the reason? Others are curious

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ameri...ning-back.html

Is there a flight crew member here who would answer some questions about the use of squawk code 7700?

I get alerts form FlightRadar 24 several times/week that a plane has done this. But the code means "General Emergency." I never see these flights on the news. So I guess the question is what constitutes a general emergency to flight crews sufficient that they will squawk 7700.

Anyone?

Then you're looking at the wrong news! http://www.avherald.com/ is a good place to start to see what really happens around the world. The vast majority of "emergencies" end well and at most end up being reported somewhere like AVHerald or here - not on mainstream news.

Remember, there's around 100,000 scheduled flights per day around the world. "Several" emergencies per week is noise (and probably far fewer 7700's than there actually are).

To get the attention of ATC as 7700 will show on every screen is one reason.