What actually happened with the British Airways flight that declared a mayday near Heathrow?

Saw scary headlines about a British Airways plane 'seconds from disaster' over London. What actually happened, and how serious was it really?

On July 6, 2026, British Airways Flight BA919, an Airbus A320 flying from Düsseldorf to Heathrow, experienced a failure in one of its Air Data Reference systems (which feed the aircraft's speed, altitude, and other flight instruments) during its approach to Runway 27L. This triggered a stall warning, and the crew declared a "PAN PAN" (an urgent-but-not-immediately-life-threatening distress call), aborted the approach, and entered a holding pattern to run checklists. On a second approach, another stall warning triggered at around 3,000 feet; the crew carried out what the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) described as a "potentially abrupt recovery manoeuvre," during which the aircraft dropped to roughly 2,200 feet before stabilizing, at which point the crew upgraded their call to a full "MAYDAY" to get priority landing clearance. The aircraft landed safely with no injuries or damage. The AAIB has classified it as a serious "loss of control in-flight" incident and opened a formal investigation — but it's worth noting the agency has explicitly said that widely circulated tabloid claims of the plane being "seconds from disaster" or the incident being caused by a "pilot blunder" have not been confirmed by its own preliminary findings, which describe the sequence of events without yet assigning a cause or fault.