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For most of us who live near or drive past East Midlands Airport, the sound of jet engines is a regular feature of our daily lives. As the summer season brings the usual holiday boom, the noise of planes taking off and coming in to land only gets more frequent.
But many may have noticed a strange sight in the skies around the airport. Ryanair planes take off, loop around in the sky, come in to land again, and then moments before touching down they start to ascend, and repeat the trick all over again.
EMA is a useful location for many of us to start a quick summer getaway, hosting airlines including TUI, Jet2 and Ryanair, among others. According to the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), it welcomed more than 830,000 passengers in 2021, despite the restrictions of the coronavirus pandemic.
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According to Manchester Airport Group, which owns the site in Castle Donington, it is also the UK’s busiest ‘pure’ cargo airport, which is where dedicated cargo planes deliver freight rather than it being delivered alongside passengers on commercial flights. It is a hub for DHL, UPS, FedEx and Royal Mail, and creates thousands of jobs in the region.
On FlightRadar, a popular website which allows users to track any flight in the world at a given time, such flights are listed as scheduled flights from EMA to Shannon, in the Republic of Ireland. It has led some to believe that there has been some sort of mid-air emergency, where a plane has had to return to EMA shortly after taking off.
Many members of the public have contacted Derbyshire Live in recent weeks wondering if passenger flights have had to make emergency landings, so we decided to investigate. But the reason for so many repeat occurrences of this is much more simple, and fortunately much less worrying, than first feared.
A spokesperson for EMA revealed that the airport is a training hub for Ryanair pilots. Cadets must undertake several take off and landing attempts prior to getting their wings, and as a result can often be seen looping around the airport as part of their training. Repeat landing and take-offs are considered a routine part of a pilot’s training.
In fact, the plane which is seen looping around is the same plane. Ryanair flight number 100T is shown by FlightRadar as making these training flights every few days, sometimes several times a day, and has been seen doing loops around EMA over the past few years despite being listed as flights to Shannon.
The flights can be as short as 20 minutes to nearly two hours, in some cases. The plane used is a Boeing 737-73S aircraft, whereas the company usually uses Boeing 737-800 planes on its passenger routes.
In 2021, 1,413 test and training flights were made from EMA, according to data from the CAA, but it doesn’t say whether all of those were completed by Ryanair trainee pilots. Between January 1 and April 30, 398 test and training flights were made.
So, that explains why the planes loop. But why are they often listed as heading to Shannon? The town, in the west of the Republic of Ireland, has been a Ryanair destination since 1986, and in May 2022 the airline opened its first heavy maintenance plant at the airport, costing millions of pounds.
It is likely that the flight is listed as heading to Shannon for administrative reasons. In any event, there are no passenger flights between EMA and Shannon, as confirmed by a simple check of the airport’s departures and arrivals board.
So while it is always good to be on the lookout, you can be rest assured that on this occasion, all is well in the skies above Derbyshire.
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