Holiday plane loses ton of fuel before landing at Gatwick

A holiday jet carrying 200 passengers lost more than a ton of fuel from an engine leak as it landed at Gatwick, a report revealed today.

Passengers were evacuated from the Thomas Cook Boeing 757 down emergency slides after it touched down on its return from Bodrum, Turkey.

According to the Daily Mail, the airfield had to be closed after the incident and 'considerable amounts' of fuel were left on the runway.

The captain had considered carrying out an emergency landing at Paris' Charles de Gaulles Airport after a warning light in the cockpit came on last year.

But air traffic control at Gatwick told the plane to make an immediate approach in the early hours of 12 June 2010.

Maintenance engineers later traced the source of the fuel leak to a pipe coupling at the fuel pump on the left engine.

A spokesman for Thomas Cook said: 'Thankfully incidents of this nature are rare and the plane landed safely with passengers leaving the plane quite normally.

'The spill was as a result of a minor technical fault which was quickly identified and corrected on landing.'

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