British Airways Boeing 757 236 incident
Boeing 757 236 · Incident
From London Heathrow Airport (EGLL) to Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (LEBL)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA09WA074
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Incident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Unknown · led by another country; figures from NTSB notifications
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- Airline
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Not recorded
Boeing 757 236
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 757
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- G-CPEM
- Operator
- British Airways
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From London Heathrow Airport (EGLL), London HeathrowTo Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (LEBL), Barcelona
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Non-U.S., Commercial
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Not recorded
- Defining eventThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Not recorded
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- None
Cause areas
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Barcelona, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
On August 2, 2009, at about 0750 UTC, a British Airways Boeing 757-236, registration number G-CPEM, declared an emergency during descent into Barcelona International Airport, Barcelona, Spain. The flight had originated at the London Heathrow International Airport, London, England. It was reported that, during the top of descent into Barcelona, a status message was seen on the flight deck along with smoke in the cabin. An acrid smoke was also smelled on the flight deck. The flight crew went on oxygen and declared a MAYDAY. The flight landed normally and the passengers were evacuated by emergency slides. There were 183 people on board and no injuries were reported. The Comision de Investigacion de Accidentes e Incidentes de Aviacion Civil (CIAIAC)of Spain is conducting a full investigation into this incident. The NTSB has assigned a US accredited representative as the state of manufacture under the provisions of ICAO Annex 13.
Inquiries on this investigation should be directed to:
Comisión de Investigación de Accidentes e Incidentes de Aviación Civil Ministerio de Fomento C\Fruela, 6 — 1ª planta 28011 Madrid Spain
E-mail: ciaiac@fomento.es Website: http://www.ciaiac.es
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA09WA074
- Event ID
- 20090820X30146
- Case number
- DCA09WA074
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: damage. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 51e58258bd3deeeae6ed1483d6f3942ce76725c0bfa8d960152a09ad34443d9a; retrieved 2026-09-15T12:49:16.585Z.