Malaga-bound Air France flight forced to make an emergency landing in Madrid

An Air France flight bound for Malaga was forced into an emergency landing very late on Thursday night.

In the midst of French traffic control staff going on strike – marking a significant uptick from the number of days it happened in 2022 – Air France won’t have done anything to make many more friends on the ground having swiftly called for an emergency landing in Madrid.

As the Air France flight AF1748 / AFR12YT was en route from the Charles De Gaulle, Paris to Malaga Airport very late on Thursday, October 13, it appeared to experience an incident onboard or involving the aircraft.

It remains unclear as to what caused the Squawk 7700 emergency code, as the aircraft landed late last night, but with no reports coming out of Madrid, it would appear that everything was swiftly brought under control, although the flight was eventually cancelled.

Air France flight makes emergency landing in Madrid

The Air France flight took off about 30 minutes later than expected from Charles De Gaulle and then just 99 minutes into the flight it was forced to make a very quick U-turn and then loop back on itself once again before being able to land safely in Madrid, and not its actual destination of Malaga.

According to Aviation Source News, the plane was at a cruising altitude of 37,000 feet, before it began to divert off course and start descending towards Madrid Airport very rapidly.

Whatever happened to this Air France flight was clearly quite significant and needed to be addressed rather quickly, because according to RadarBox (via Aviation Source News), the aircraft was descending at a rate of nearly 5,200 per minute.

Have other flights had to make emergency landings in Spain?

The aircraft landed at 11:08 pm local time and just a while later it was declared that it would not be taking off again from Madrid to the original destination of Malaga, leading to likely customer chaos for the French company to cope with.

It is quite worrying that Air France has not seen fit to release a statement as to what happened on board their AF1748 / AFR12YT, especially when it felt necessary to initiate such a rapid descent.

This is becoming quite a regular occurrence for flights to call for an emergency landing while en route to Spanish destinations with the likes of Ryanair and Jet2 all experiencing similar fates.

The crew on board a Ryanair flight were forced to eject a passenger off a flight when the gentleman was clearly way too intoxicated to be on board as he could barely stand up when police boarded the aircarft which was bound for the party island of Ibiza.