Chennai-bound British Airways flight returns to London after ‘technical snag’

Data from the website shows that the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner circled over the Strait of Dover multiple times before returning to London’s Heathrow Airport. File
| Photo Credit: The Hindu

A London-Chennai flight of British Airways operated by a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft returned to the airport of origin mid-flight due to a “technical issue”, the airline said.

Lufthansa’s Frankfurt-Hyderabad flight operated on a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner also returned to the airport of origin mid-flight following a bomb threat.

“The aircraft returned to Heathrow as a standard precaution after reports of a technical issue,” British Airways said in a press statement.

“The flight landed safely with crew and customers disembarking as they normally would, and our teams are working hard to get their journeys back on track as soon as possible,” the statement added.

As per the data available with Flightradar24, flight BA35 took off from Heathrow Airport at 1.16 p.m. after a 36-minute delay.

Data from the website shows that the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner circled over the Strait of Dover multiple times before returning to London’s Heathrow Airport.

In a separate incident, a Hyderabad-bound Lufthansa aircraft from Frankfurt returned to its base mid-flight following a bomb threat, prompting a full-scale security response.

The flight, LH 752, operated by a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner, departed Frankfurt Airport around 6 p.m. According to flight tracking data, the aircraft had been airborne for nearly two hours and was flying over Bulgarian airspace when it made a U-turn and was diverted back to Frankfurt.

The aircraft had been scheduled to arrive at Hyderabad’s Rajiv Gandhi International Airport (RGIA) at approximately 1.20 a.m. on Monday (June 16, 2025).

“We checked with the airline and it has been confirmed that there was allegedly a bomb threat and that is why it was diverted,” an official at Hyderabad airport told The Hindu.