A British Airways Airbus A320 called mayday on approach to Heathrow Airport after two stall warnings on 6 July, then landed without further incident. The UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch has opened a serious incident probe into what happened in the final minutes of the flight.
The aircraft had left Dusseldorf airport in Germany and was descending toward Heathrow when the first stall warning appeared. The crew then flew the jet in alternate law, before another stall warning came at 3,000 feet and the urgency call was upgraded to mayday. That sequence is why British Airways Flight Stall Warnings has become a live search term now: the flight ended safely, but the cockpit response was serious enough to trigger formal scrutiny.
David Gleave said an urgency message can be at the captain’s discretion and may be used when passengers need urgent medical attention, which is one reason the word does not always mean the same thing from one flight to another. But in this case the warning chain was tied to a technical problem, not a routine cabin issue. The French Air Safety Investigation Authority said there was a data system failure as the plane approached Heathrow, and that failure triggered the first stall warning.
That detail matters because alternate law removes some automated flight protection systems, leaving the crew with fewer built-in safeguards than in normal operation. It also leaves open the unanswered point at the center of the investigation: what exactly failed in the data system, and why the aircraft gave a second stall warning after the crew had already changed how it was being flown.
The AAIB said it was carrying out a correspondence investigation and would not send a team for field work. British Airways said it was assisting the AAIB with its investigation and was not legally able to comment further at this stage. The most likely outcome is that the written inquiry will decide whether the aircraft’s warning system, the switch to alternate law or the crew’s response turned a serious approach into a safe landing, but the technical trigger remains the piece that has not yet been pinned down.
