Breaking: Incident at British Airways Lounge at Heathrow
An unidentified male passenger was transported from London’s Heathrow Airport by air ambulance after falling from an outdoor balcony. The incident at British Airways’ Galleries Nouth Lounge in Terminal 5 occurred mid-afternoon.
An eyewitness reports hearing the words “No” and looking up to see the legs of the passenger who had appeared to have fallen head first over the railing of the balcony. He landed on a glass covering over an escalator below and was seen “twitching in a pool of blood”.
BA staff redirected arriving passengers to the South Galleries Lounges after the incident.
The status of the victim is unknown at this time. He was reportedly with two other passengers, a male and female, at the time of the incident.
9:50 am CT – I’m not finding any news reports yet so I’m compiling (above) what is known at this point from my witness and from the reports on FlyerTalk.com
9:00 am CT – It’s been reported that an air ambulance has now landed near the lounge. My original witness has now boarded a flight but there is now a discussion thread on the British Airways forum at FlyerTalk.com
8:40 am CT – I have spoken with a passenger (who asks to remain unnamed) who witnessed the incident who said there is “blood everywhere”.
The incident took place at the North Terminal 5 Lounge in the outside seating area. The male passenger went over the balcony railing and hit his head as he fell below. The unidentified victim was reportedly with another man and a woman.
Reports are that BA personnel are now turning away new passengers from the North Lounge and redirecting them to the South Lounge.
8:30 am CT – There is a report on my social media feed from an eyewitness that an individual has jumped off a balcony at the British Airways Terminal 5 South North Lounge at London’s Heathrow Airport, landing on a glass escalator covering below.
I will update this story with further details as they become available.
Much of the FlyerTalk thread was in poor taste, but it was started by an eye witness and posted on the BA board — where it might have had limited ‘news’ value for people in or near the lounge. Posting this here as “breaking news”, complete with rather gory details, is in exceptionally poor taste.
Two notes… 1) The thread on FlyerTalk had not been started when I posted this based on two separate accounts of the incident that appeared on my Facebook message stream. At the time, not much was known so it was, indeed, breaking news that at the time. 2) Not everyone in the travel world reads FlyerTalk – and its certainly not where any of my editorial content was coming from – the closure of that thread, from what I could tell, was due to some rather distasteful comments made about the incident.
Thank you for responding. I still don’t understand how this post fits with your goals — set out on your FAQ page, for example — for this blog. Posting still seems like an error of judgement to me.
I’m always going to write about things I see that interest me where travel/life/work balance intersect. That includes potential disruptions to travel, which can sometimes happen following an incident in an airport. In this case, I wasn’t interested in the more vulgar aspects of the story – but it piqued my interest when two different friends of mine on Facebook (who don’t know each other) posted about the same incident unfolding in front of them. If that’s not “breaking news, I don’t know what is. I can see where someone who wasn’t following this as it was posted assuming I ripped it from FlyerTalk and reposted it – totally not the case and I’d certainly take exception to that too. In fact, my title first appeared with an “unconfirmed” which I later removed after having a conversation with one of the lounge witnesses. I do try to avoid clickbait headlines – and where I have other details that are relevant before the click (a trip report from 2008, for example), I’m going to disclose those up front. In this case I thought adding any additional detail about the incident in the headline would be distasteful – but I felt like the Breaking News part was accurate since I was writing about it before the paramedics arrived (and updating the information as I received additional information) and it had a potential travel impact to anyone flying out of T5.
I’m happy to accept that your motivation for posting wasn’t the FlyerTalk thread. We’ll have to agree to disagree about the rights and wrongs of your post about an individual tragedy that never threatened to affect flights.