Busted: £100K In Cocaine Stashed In British Airways 777 Lavatory

Yesterday I wrote about how a British Airways flight from Cancun to London was canceled after authorities performed a drug bust prior to departure, whereby they found drugs stashed in a bag. As it turns out, that’s not the only British Airways drug bust incident in recent days.

British Airways engineer finds cocaine hidden in lavatory

The Sun reports on yet another British Airways drug bust, this time involving a Boeing 777-200ER that had just flown from Orlando (MCO) to London Gatwick (LGW). After the flight, the aircraft was towed into a maintenance hangar for some routine maintenance.

While that was being performed, a service engineer made quite the startling discovery in one of the lavatories — there was a brick of cocaine valued at £100K hidden in a panel behind a bin in the lavatory. The engineer then called the police, and now Border Force and the National Crime Agency are investigating the incident. Those are all the details that are known as of now.

As mentioned above, this is the second drug bust in a matter of days involving a Gatwick-based British Airways 777, as a Cancun to London flight was also canceled after authorities in Mexico suspended boarding of the flight, so that they could search some bags on the plane, which were later found to have drugs in them.

Hopefully authorities can uncover this scheme

A fair amount of drug trafficking happens via commercial aircraft, though this comes in a variety of forms — sometimes drugs are carried by a courier, and other times drugs are concealed in the aircraft.

In a situation like this, where drugs are concealed in some part of the aircraft, it seems likely that there’s a network of people involved here. Someone with access to the aircraft on departure would likely have concealed the drugs in the lavatory, with the plan being for some worker at Gatwick to access the plane on arrival, and get the drugs.

Obviously that didn’t work out, though, when the plane underwent scheduled maintenance between flights, and the “precious cargo” was discovered.

I can’t help but be curious if the drugs were actually loaded in Orlando, or if they had been flying on the aircraft for a lot longer than that. I’m by no means an expert on drug trade (other than having watched my fair share of shows about it), but with the street value in the US and UK being comparable, that doesn’t seem like efficient movement, and cartels seem to be pretty good at logistics.

British Airways’ Gatwick-based 777s fly to all kinds of airports where it seems more likely that drugs could’ve been loaded, like Cancun (CUN), Kingston (KIN), Port of Spain (POS), Punta Cana (PUJ), etc. It’s possible that the traffickers felt confident in where they had stored the drugs, and were just waiting for the lowest risk opportunity to remove them from the plane.

Bottom line

A British Airways 777 had a second drug bust in a matter of days. In this case, an engineer at Gatwick Airport was performing maintenance on an aircraft, when cocaine was discovered hidden behind a panel in the lavatory. Authorities were contacted, and this is now being investigated. Given that the jet was arriving from Orlando, one wonders if the drugs may have actually been loaded a couple of flights prior.

What do you make of this second British Airways drug bust?