Originally Posted by
wiggy
So either flight radar has tracked that one flight incorrectly, or the aircraft you saw wasn’t the BA 479.
Almost certainly the latter. As Kelvin noted, Heathrow's own WebTrak system (based on NATS radars rather than the ADS-B that the flight trackers use) is the best reference source to use for LHR arrival/departure tracks.
WebTrak shows a horizontal and vertical profile absolutely typical of an Ockham STAR and hold on westerlies:
(we'll ignore the jink over Greenwich Park
)
I too would be very interested to know how the OP positively ID'd the flight.
As an aside, the question of whether BA479 flew two or three orbits of the hold is interesting - while it looks like two in the above graphic, zooming in shows that it was three and is a great illustration of just how accurately modern airliners can execute a holding pattern:
