Wizz Air flight from Poland to London forced to make emergency landing in Amsterdam after ‘smoke fills cockpit'
The flight diverted to Amsterdal Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands after the crew issued a Mayday call for urgent assistance.
The Airbus A321 taxied to the gate, where all passengers were evacuated.
Emergency crews on the ground declared a major incident, according to BNO news.
A fleet fire trucks, ambulances and a medical helicopter descended on the plane after it stopped.
Crews rushed on board in to investigate the cause of the smoke.
The landing reportedly ran smoothly and there were no reports of casualties.
It was not immediately clear what caused the outpouring of smoke.
The London Luton-bound flight had departed from Poznań, and was forced to land at Schiphol Airport.
An emergency was declared onboard at around 11:30am BST on Sunday.
A spokesperson for the airline told BNO News: 'As a recovery plan, Wizz Air has immediately sent an aircraft from London Luton Airport to bring the affected passengers to London Luton as soon as possible."
They added: 'The safety of our passengers and crew is of utmost priority.
"We are keeping all affected passengers promptly informed on developments and will be providing WIZZ vouchers to all of them.'
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Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Travel chaos in Britain as 2.7M drivers hit the roads on Frantic Friday
Britain's big summer getaway turned into chaos on 'Frantic Friday' today as an airport terminal was evacuated, a major motorway was blocked and trains were cancelled. Some 2.7million leisure journeys were being made on the roads today, according to RAC estimates - with motorists warned to avoid heading out before 7pm tonight. Many families were on the move after the schools broke up for summer, but there was disruption for those travelling to London Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports. Areas of Heathrow's Terminal 3 were evacuated this morning while a fire alarm was investigated, which passengers said had caused huge queues at passport control. In Essex, drivers on the M11 were warned of seven-mile queues after it was blocked in both directions near Stansted after two crashes between junctions eight and nine. Those heading to Gatwick were hit by train chaos after a points failure at Haywards Heath impacted services operated by Gatwick Express, Southern and Thameslink. Other disrupted rail services included LNER between Retford and Newark after a train hit an obstruction on the track; and the Mildmay line in London due to defective track. Great Western Railway trains between Castle Cary and Westbury were affected by a points failure; while four Hull Trains services were cancelled due to Aslef strike action. At Heathrow today, passengers complained of queues after a fire alarm at Terminal 3 just after 11am led to a temporary evacuation being carried out for safety reasons. Arriving passenger Christina Warren tweeted: 'Landed at Heathrow an hour early but there was a fire alarm so the line for passport control is literally backed up literally the entire terminal because of a fire alarm going off.' Natalie Berg, who tweeted a photo of the queues, said on X: 'Nearly two hours and line has barely moved at Heathrow. Just been told immigration and baggage reclaim has now reopened so hopefully on the move soon.' And another passenger in the terminal wrote: 'Fire crews investigating incident in baggage hall at Heathrow T3 mean security birder is currently closed. Very long queue already.' A Heathrow spokeswoman told MailOnline: 'Following an earlier fire alarm evacuation in parts of Terminal 3, the incident has now been stood down. We apologise for any disruption caused to journeys.' Passengers were later allowed into the baggage reclaim hall to collect their bags and get on their way. Meanwhile drivers in Kent were at a standstill as they queued to use the Port of Dover after holidaymakers and freight lorries descended in large numbers. The vehicles were moving very slowly through Dover from the A20, and down Jubilee Way towards the port. An update from Port of Dover said the traffic into the port was causing delays of around an hour. A traffic control system was in place, and one traffic warden told an eyewitness that they had received a lot of verbal abuse from drivers. Doug Bannister, chief executive at the Port of Dover said his organisation has been 'preparing for a busy summer' and have brought in measures to 'minimise disruption'. He said: 'We know how vital it is to keep things moving, not just for holidaymakers but for our local community too. 'That's why we've boosted staff levels, strengthened traffic management, added welfare facilities and introduced AI-powered forecasting - all to minimise disruption and ensure both residents and travellers have the best possible experience during this busy season.' The Port of Dover said it was expecting nearly 40,000 cars this weekend and more than 270,000 in the next six weeks. The RAC revealed on Monday that a larger number of drivers than ever before were expected to head off on holiday at some point this week, rather than wait until the weekend to get away. But the first getaway weekend will also be busy with 2.7million journeys planned on 'Frantic Friday' today. Following this there will be a 'Saturday Scramble' tomorrow as the largest number of journeys on a single day - 3million - is set to take place. An extra 2.7million trips are expected on Sunday, and 4.6million more at some point over the weekend, bringing the total number of journeys this week to 26.9million. The M40 northbound between J12 for Gaydon in Warwickshire and the M42 exit at J3A in the West Midlands could see major delays. Queues are also likely on the M1 northbound from J12 to J16 in Northamptonshire; and on the M4 westbound from J22 for the Pilning Interchange near Severn Beach across the Prince of Wales Bridge to J26 for Newport. The M1 northbound from J22 near Leicester to J26 for Nottingham, near the Peak District, could face 40-minute delays. Queues of 50 minutes along the M25 anticlockwise from J4 for Sevenoaks to the Dartford Crossing are also likely. The RAC and Inrix are jointly urging those setting off at the weekend to travel as early or late as possible – with traffic set to be at its worst through the middle of the day.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘I would be terrible at this!': inside the fiendish TV guessing game whose players have no idea where they are
Outside a cinema in east London sits an absolute beast of a bus. It is jet black from wheel wells to roof, the windows are obscured by metal plates and it is so massive rock stars might kip in it prior to hopping on stage and yelling: 'Hello Milton Keynes!' Essentially, it looks like a gothic Megabus commissioned by Alice Cooper. It does, however, have one key design flaw: it's impossible to see out of. Once you're inside, you will have no idea where you are going. For the next five weeks, expect to see a lot of this vehicle. It's the star of the BBC's latest big reality series, Destination X. Based on a Belgian hit, it sees 13 contestants ferried around Europe in total ignorance of their location, with the worst at identifying it being eliminated. Viewers are encouraged to guess along as its OTT challenges see contestants locked in boxes in village squares, peeping through a tiny window to work out where they are, or being whisked up a snow-topped mountain and made to hunt for clues while dangling from a rope 2,000 metres above sea level. Given that they spend an entire month living and sleeping on a coach together, there are points where cabin fever-ravaged contestants become so suspicious of each other that heated arguments flare up. It is, essentially, The Traitors meets Race Across the World – hosted by Rob Brydon. Today, I am its newest contestant. For the next couple of hours, I will be joining Brydon and a handful of other first-time players onboard the 'X bus' for a whistlestop blind tour of London following a quick screening of the show at Hoxton's Curzon cinema. While this may lack the scale of a pan-European jaunt, the crew's commitment to realism means that they have painstakingly recreated the kind of temperatures you'd expect from a summer in southern Spain. Well, that or the air-conditioning is broken. 'Bloody hell! Is it hot enough in here?' exclaims Brydon as he gets on the bus. He takes a moment to remove his navy blazer and mop his brow, before leaping straight back into presenting mode. 'The clues are there!' he announces as the coach rumbles to life and we drive off to the sound of the most Rob Brydon thing imaginable – an impression of a TV star whose best-known work came before the 1990s. 'As David Frost used to say, the clues are there as we go through the keyhole …' Exactly how you play this game is a mystery. It seems really quite random. But there's one thing that is obvious from even a quick watch: you need your wits about you, because this is one devious TV show. The first episode opens with the contestants waiting in a packed German airport. But all the other passengers are actors. The check-in staff are fake. It is littered with details that the unknowing participants will shortly be tested on in a game they have to survive to avoid being kicked off the show – from fake couples loudly arguing about the allowable weight of luggage to names read out over the PA system. Before the passengers are even allowed on the bus, they're stuffed into a helicopter, blindfolded and disorientated by being flown around for an hour. Hopefully, they didn't come up with this idea based on the fact that the East German Stasi used the same tactic with political prisoners being driven to jail. But there is sneakiness here that even the Stasi didn't think of: to make contestants think they have landed in the same place as they took off, they employ three sets of identical twins as fake airport staff. One set are in the original location, the second at the landing site. All the contestants need to do to figure it out is read the microscopic names on their identity badges. 'That is the nuts!' chuckles the executive producer Dan Adamson. 'We just thought: wouldn't it be funny?' Very sly. But while they go to extreme lengths to confuse the contestants, presumably they don't deliberately make them think they're in completely the wrong place? For example, at one point in Destination X's first episode we're shown a teaser of a screen being driven up alongside the bus as it barrels down the road, and playing a video through the window. That's not an attempt to show fake scenery, is it? 'No, we're showing them a clue,' says Adamson. So we can trust what we're shown through this bus's windows should they open? 'We don't have the budget to CGI,' says Brydon. 'Otherwise I would have been a bit taller!' As if on cue, the bus window pops open. We're crossing the Thames on Tower Bridge! Well, hopefully I can trust that. Not that it is particularly useful info. How on earth do you do this? 'We had players who would try to track the sun,' says Adamson. 'We had one player who every time we went in a tunnel would count to see how long it was. They were trying to work out the speed and the distance of the coach. And they would react to weather, you know: it's getting warmer, it's getting colder …' 'I would be terrible at this,' says Brydon. 'If I saw the sun, that would tell me it's daytime.' The more you hear about the show, the harder it is not to be blown away by the logistics involved. The sheer number of staff and kit meant that, according to Adamson, they had to travel in a convoy of about 50 vehicles, all of which did 11,000km in 32 days, before the 190 staff retired to one of the 7,000 hotel rooms they booked during the shoot. Every piece of food or drink had to be removed from its packaging and put in an unmarked container. To give contestants a fresh air 'safe zone' after a journey, they'd park other coaches alongside the bus to create a four-walled square, top it with a camo net to prevent them seeing out and install a carpet and running machine. When Brydon arrived on location, he said the sheer scale meant it was often like they had 'built a new town'. It is, however, hard not to wonder: is this the most environmentally responsible way to make a TV show? At this point in our race towards climate catastrophe, isn't it in poor taste to pump 11,000km worth of vehicle emissions into the atmosphere – particularly given that it comes from the channel behind The Traitors, who know only too well how to create astonishingly addictive TV while barely leaving one building? According to the BBC, 'Destination X is certified by Bafta Albert, which encourages sustainable TV and film production, confirming that consideration of carbon emission reduction was given throughout the production.' They point out to me that they had a 'carbon action plan' whose measures included crew taking big minibuses to reduce the number of vehicles and minimising the diesel generators used – meaning they were certified two out of a possible three stars by Albert. The coaches were also not petrol, but Euro 6 diesel engines. So choosing to do all these miles is less an issue with the climate crisis, and more one of the air quality local kids breathed. Talking of air quality, that presented its own challenge for the contestants cooped up on a coach together. 'We set ourselves one rule: no number twos on the bus. That gave us a problem. Suddenly it was like: why do these people have to go to the toilet so often?' says Adamson of the fact that they had to pull the coach over every time anyone needed to go. 'Everyone had to be really open about it – you couldn't be discreet. You'd be blindfolded, chaperoned, have someone waiting outside while you did your business … I can't believe how much time we spent talking about toilets.' At this point, Big Ben starts chiming. For a brief moment I can't work out whether it's real or coming over the coach's sound system, until I look at my watch and realise it's 2.12pm – not a usual time for a clock to chime. 'He shouldn't have been allowed his watch!' exclaims Brydon. Sign up to What's On Get the best TV reviews, news and features in your inbox every Monday after newsletter promotion 'On the original Belgian format, they had a clock on the bus that they controlled the speed of, and they would slow it down,' says Adamson. 'But we decided not to do that, because it was a little too machiavellian.' 'You know what they did have on that bus, though?' shoots back Brydon. 'Very good air con.' Over the course of the next hour, the windows pop open again, only to reveal that we are once more crossing the Thames, this time on London Bridge, now going north. Production staff repeatedly insist that there are clues all over the bus even though all I can see are a couple of half-inched boxes of popcorn and some flyers from the Curzon, plus a few bags of rapidly melting mini Wispas. 'Is it worth mentioning to the driver that the air conditioning is ineffectual?' asks a reddening Brydon. 'We're all sitting here like lobsters in a pot.' By now, he's looking a tad dishevelled. Which is a shame, because one of the most fun things about Destination X is Brydon going all flamboyant with his sartorial choices: from dressing like an airline captain to checked blazers that wouldn't look out of place on Toad from The Wind in the Willows to a moment he turns up dressed as Indiana Jones. 'I did look to Claudia Winkleman on The Traitors,' he says. 'I've gone for it!' At this point, the coach grinds to a halt. We're ushered to a recreation of 'the map room': the cubbyhole that contestants use to make their guess by placing an X on a digital map. They normally get two minutes – I'm given one. Bearing in mind the Big Ben bells we were played, I try to scroll across the map to find where Big Ben's bell was created: Whitechapel Bell Foundry. But I can't find it on the map. So as I run out of time, I go for plan B: Westminster, home of Big Ben. 'The person whose guess was furthest from the location is …' announces one of the show's producers, once we've all placed our X, '… Alexi!' Great. Last place. If this were the actual show, I'd have been booted off the coach at a random European destination. But as I step off the X bus, I find that we are … back at the Curzon cinema where we started. Exactly what sort of clues were meant to tip us off to that being our destination? 'Didn't you see the tubs of Curzon popcorn and Curzon flyers?' I thought they'd been nicked from the cinema! 'There were fake tickets hidden in the cushions as well if you looked.' Brilliant. Clearly, I'd be terrible at the show. But it's not like I missed out on much. 'The prize?' I hear Adamson reply. 'Oh yeah, it's excellent … have a bag of melted Wispas.' Destination X is on BBC One on Wednesday and Thursday at 9pm.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
The slow road to summer! 2.7million drivers hit the roads on Frantic Friday as families head on holidays with hour-long queues at Dover, Heathrow terminal evacuated and chaos on trains
Britain's big summer getaway turned into chaos on 'Frantic Friday' today as an airport terminal was evacuated, a major motorway was blocked and trains were cancelled. Some 2.7million leisure journeys were being made on the roads today, according to RAC estimates - with motorists warned to avoid heading out before 7pm tonight. Many families were on the move after the schools broke up for summer, but there was disruption for those travelling to London Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports. Areas of Heathrow's Terminal 3 were evacuated this morning while a fire alarm was investigated, which passengers said had caused huge queues at passport control. In Essex, drivers on the M11 were warned of seven-mile queues after it was blocked in both directions near Stansted after two crashes between junctions eight and nine. Those heading to Gatwick were hit by train chaos after a points failure at Haywards Heath impacted services operated by Gatwick Express, Southern and Thameslink. Other disrupted rail services included LNER between Retford and Newark after a train hit an obstruction on the track; and the Mildmay line in London due to defective track. Great Western Railway trains between Castle Cary and Westbury were affected by a points failure; while four Hull Trains services were cancelled due to Aslef strike action. Areas of Heathrow's Terminal 3 were evacuated this morning while a fire alarm was investigated, which passengers said had caused huge queues for passport control At Heathrow today, passengers complained of queues after a fire alarm at Terminal 3 just after 11am led to a temporary evacuation being carried out for safety reasons. Arriving passenger Christina Warren tweeted: 'Landed at Heathrow an hour early but there was a fire alarm so the line for passport control is literally backed up literally the entire terminal because of a fire alarm going off.' Natalie Berg, who tweeted a photo of the queues, said on X: 'Nearly two hours and line has barely moved at Heathrow. Just been told immigration and baggage reclaim has now reopened so hopefully on the move soon.' And another passenger in the terminal wrote: 'Fire crews investigating incident in baggage hall at Heathrow T3 mean security birder is currently closed. Very long queue already.' A Heathrow spokeswoman told MailOnline: 'Following an earlier fire alarm evacuation in parts of Terminal 3, the incident has now been stood down. We apologise for any disruption caused to journeys.' Passengers were later allowed into the baggage reclaim hall to collect their bags and get on their way. Meanwhile drivers in Kent were at a standstill as they queued to use the Port of Dover after holidaymakers and freight lorries descended in large numbers. The vehicles were moving very slowly through Dover from the A20, and down Jubilee Way towards the port. An update from Port of Dover said the traffic into the port was causing delays of around an hour. A traffic control system was in place, and one traffic warden told an eyewitness that they had received a lot of verbal abuse from drivers. Doug Bannister, chief executive at the Port of Dover said his organisation has been 'preparing for a busy summer' and have brought in measures to 'minimise disruption'. He said: 'We know how vital it is to keep things moving, not just for holidaymakers but for our local community too. 'That's why we've boosted staff levels, strengthened traffic management, added welfare facilities and introduced AI-powered forecasting - all to minimise disruption and ensure both residents and travellers have the best possible experience during this busy season.' The Port of Dover said it was expecting nearly 40,000 cars this weekend and more than 270,000 in the next six weeks. The RAC revealed on Monday that a larger number of drivers than ever before were expected to head off on holiday at some point this week, rather than wait until the weekend to get away. But the first getaway weekend will also be busy with 2.7million journeys planned on 'Frantic Friday' today. Following this there will be a 'Saturday Scramble' tomorrow as the largest number of journeys on a single day - 3million - is set to take place. An extra 2.7million trips are expected on Sunday, and 4.6million more at some point over the weekend, bringing the total number of journeys this week to 26.9million. The M40 northbound between J12 for Gaydon in Warwickshire and the M42 exit at J3A in the West Midlands could see major delays. Queues are also likely on the M1 northbound from J12 to J16 in Northamptonshire; and on the M4 westbound from J22 for the Pilning Interchange near Severn Beach across the Prince of Wales Bridge to J26 for Newport. The M1 northbound from J22 near Leicester to J26 for Nottingham, near the Peak District, could face 40-minute delays. Queues of 50 minutes along the M25 anticlockwise from J4 for Sevenoaks to the Dartford Crossing are also likely. The RAC and Inrix are jointly urging those setting off at the weekend to travel as early or late as possible – with traffic set to be at its worst through the middle of the day. Anyone going away today or on Sunday was encouraged to try to start their trips before 10am or after 7pm, while Saturday drivers were told to consider heading out before 10am. RAC mobile servicing and repairs team leader Nick Mullender said tomorrow is expected be the 'single busiest day for summer traffic with many drivers travelling long distances to get to their holiday destination'.
