An El-Al plane carrying 450 passengers, preparing to land in London’s Heathrow Airport last January, unusually lost altitude for a short amount of time forcing the captain to disconnect the automatic pilot and to recover the plane from its dangerous dive toward the ground, which, had it continued, would have resulted in a crash in less than a minute.

The plane ultimately landed safely, but investigation of the even in Britain didn’t come to any conclusions. Until now it is still unclear what the reasons for the malfunction were, partly because it was made known to authorized British officials late by which time the relevant statistics from the black boxes had been erased.

The incident, which hasn’t been reported until now, was revealed Friday night in the new newspaper The London Paper in Britain. Ynet obtained the report detailing the sequence of events as was investigated by the AAIB- Air Accidents Investigation Branch.

El-Al said to Ynet in response that this was a nonevent and that its level of danger was minimal. The company also said that the report was passed on to the company’s manager, and that since the event, the plane has successfully completed might flights with no malfunction.

El Al chief of operations Lior Yavor said in response, “we do not consider this an incident; it is defined by us as minimum-risk; when El Al planes fly over Tel Aviv they are also at 1,200 feet. The passengers were not in danger, they weren’t aware of anything. The plane has 10 more systems that warn the crew of altitude loss, and in any event they would have been set off at 800 feet. This is one of those things that can happen when a passenger turns an MP3 player on, or a radio or cell phone. The loss of landing help signals can occur; it is similar to a computer malfunction that can be fixed by restarting the computer. From our standpoint, a roll that burns in the oven and causes a fire is a more dangerous incident.�? 

Ynet