A British Airways plane blocked one of the runways at London Heathrow on Tuesday after it suffered a technical fault.

Flight BA849 from Zagreb was stuck on the runway after landing at 14:58.

BA said the A319 suffered a ‘minor technical issue’ that meant it was unable to taxi to the stand.

Instead, it had to be towed, which took around 30 minutes.

A similar incident happened at London Gatwick only last week, when an Emirates A380 got stuck on the runway, causing flights to be grounded for almost an hour.

However, Heathrow, which has a second runway, insisted that its operations continued ‘as normal’ yesterday.

Flightradar24 shows that most departures from Heathrow were delayed following the incident yesterday afternoon, most by 30-90 minutes.

However, BA departures to Hyderabad, Valencia, Nashville, Zurich and Munich were all delayed by between 40 minutes and three hours, but the airline has not attributed these solely to the incident.

While BA’s aircraft remained on the tarmac, Heathrow switched to single runway operations for both take-off and landings.

A BA spokesperson said: “We’re sorry for the delay in our customers’ journey after their aircraft experienced a minor technical issue that delayed its arrival onto the stand.”

Image is of BA319 from Shutterstock