BA 777 aftermath - overshoots

[Hartington]

The plane immediately following the crashed BA 777 will have had to overshoot. I suspect the one behind that also overshot. But at what point did overshoots terminate and the controllers started vectoring aircraft away from LHR? And what happened to the aircraft that did overshoot? Did they go back into the bottom of the stacks (or the top?) or divert immediately or what?

So many unknowns, and ATC will have swung professionally into a 'plan' for this sort of event - runway blocked and rescue services depleted.

Best answered by those who were there in ATC at the time, so over to the ATC forum.

[Gonzo]

This is all from memory......the first one did go around, and was vectored back in for the other runway.

The two or three next inbounds were switched to the other runway.

And then we stopped all movements until we had confirmed what the residual fire cover was (Airfields each have a firefighting category.....Heathrow's is 9...this is dependent on many things; number of fire appliances, supplies of water and foam etc etc. With a lot of Heathrow's firefighting resource committed to BAW38, we had to wait until it was confirmed that what remained was enough to keep the airfield operating.

As we stopped all movements just as the a/c that had been behind BAW38 and was being vectored back in, it diverted to Gatwick as we didn't know when we'd 're-open'. I think it flew Gatwick to Heathrow later that day.