On the night of July 1, 2025, easyJet flight U22058 was roughly an hour from Manchester when the crew activated a Squawk 7700 transponder code at 38,000 feet above France. The aircraft began descending toward Paris. A passenger on board had become seriously ill, and ground-level medical care could not wait.
Five weeks later, on August 6, 2025, a different aircraft operating the same Heraklion to Manchester service declared another emergency over France. This time the cause was mechanical: a hydraulic leak. The crew squawked 7700 and diverted to the same airport.
The two incidents shared a flight number, a transponder code, and a diversion airport. The aircraft involved were different generations. The problems were unrelated. And they happened five weeks apart.
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The July 1 Emergency: A Passenger Falls Ill Over France
Flight U22058 had departed Heraklion International Airport “Nikos Kazantzakis” at 20:57 local time (18:57 BST), scheduled to land at Manchester at 23:05 BST. The aircraft was G-UZEF, an Airbus A320neo delivered to easyJet UK in January 2025, just six months before the incident. At the time, easyJet UK operated 50 A320neos with an average fleet age of 4.7 years. G-UZEF was one of the youngest in that group.
When the crew declared an emergency over France, AIRLIVE, the aviation news network that has tracked global flight incidents since 2014, reported the situation as it developed. Below is the confirmed sequence of events from that night:
| Time (BST) | Verified Event |
|---|---|
| 22:12 | AIRLIVE publishes report; diversion to Paris CDG confirmed, medical emergency cited as cause |
| 22:17 | G-UZEF lands on Runway 26R at Paris Charles de Gaulle |
| 22:21 | Aircraft parked at Terminal 2; medical teams on standby |
| 22:22 | @FlightEmergency confirms medical cause via live AirNav Radar data |
AIRLIVE’s report stated the emergency had been declared in the 20 to 30 minutes before publication, placing the Squawk 7700 activation at approximately 21:42 to 21:52 BST. AviationSource News verified the cause independently: a passenger had become seriously ill and the crew determined that continuing to Manchester was not a safe option.
No fatalities were reported. The UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) opened no investigation, which is standard for a diversion handled safely and without structural incident.
What Squawk 7700 Tells Air Traffic Control
Squawk 7700 is the ICAO-standardised transponder code for a general in-flight emergency. When activated, it appears on every air traffic control radar screen in range simultaneously, with no delay.
The code triggers four immediate responses:
- Full airspace priority is granted to the aircraft above all other traffic
- Direct ATC coordination begins with the nearest appropriate airport
- Emergency services are pre-positioned at the receiving airport before the aircraft lands
- No cause declaration is required at activation, so medical, mechanical, and other emergencies follow the same initial response from the ground
Paris Charles de Gaulle sits at roughly the geographic midpoint of the Heraklion to Manchester routing over French airspace. When an emergency occurs in that corridor, CDG is the closest major international airport with full emergency capacity. Because the Squawk was activated 20 to 30 minutes before AIRLIVE’s 22:12 BST report, ground services at Paris CDG had time to position medical teams at Runway 26R before G-UZEF touched down at 22:17 BST.
August 6: Same Flight Number, Different Aircraft, Different Problem
Five weeks after the medical diversion, U22058 appeared in aviation tracking alerts again. The aircraft this time was G-EZTJ, an Airbus A320-200, an older variant than the A320neo involved on July 1. Over France, the crew declared an emergency and diverted to Paris CDG. The cause was a hydraulic leak.
| July 1, 2025 | August 6, 2025 | |
|---|---|---|
| Aircraft | G-UZEF | G-EZTJ |
| Type | Airbus A320neo | Airbus A320-200 |
| Cause | Passenger medical emergency | Hydraulic leak |
| Diversion airport | Paris Charles de Gaulle | Paris Charles de Gaulle |
| Passengers injured | None | None |
Real-time tracking accounts @FlightEmergency and @Squawk_Alert on X both confirmed the squawk and the diversion. G-EZTJ was grounded at Paris CDG for inspection and repairs. The AAIB opened no investigation for this incident either, which again reflects a diversion resolved safely and without escalation.
Two different aircraft generations, two unrelated causes, the same flight number, and the same diversion airport within five weeks of each other.
How Rare Is an In-Flight Medical Diversion?
Rarer than the volume of reporting around individual incidents tends to suggest.
A 2025 study published in JAMA Network Open analysed 77,790 in-flight medical events reported by 84 airlines across 2022 and 2023. Researchers found that aircraft diversion resulted from just 1.7% of those events. The conditions most associated with triggering a diversion were suspected stroke, with an adjusted odds ratio of 20.35, and acute cardiac emergencies, at 8.16.
The broader rate of in-flight medical events across commercial aviation sat at 39 per million enplanements, roughly one event for every 212 flights. The large majority are managed onboard without any change to the flight plan. When a crew does divert, it reflects a medical assessment that the risk of continuing outweighed the disruption of landing short.
A separate peer-reviewed systematic review covering approximately 1.5 billion passengers found that a single emergency diversion costs between $15,000 and $893,000, depending on aircraft size, airport fees, rebooking, and accommodation.
Passenger Rights: What U22058 Passengers Were Owed
For passengers who landed in Paris expecting Manchester, the compensation picture under aviation consumer law is straightforward.
Under UK Regulation 261 and EU Regulation 261/2004, a passenger medical emergency qualifies as an extraordinary circumstance. Both regulations applied to U22058 because it departed from Heraklion, an EU airport, on a UK carrier.
What that classification means in practice:
- No fixed-rate cash compensation is owed for the diversion or the resulting delay to Manchester
- Meals and refreshments at Paris CDG were the airline’s obligation while passengers waited
- Rebooking on the next available service to Manchester, or a full refund, was owed to every affected passenger
- Hotel accommodation at the airline’s cost was required for any passenger needing to stay overnight in Paris
The extraordinary circumstance classification removes the statutory cash penalty. The duty of care requirements around food, accommodation, and onward travel apply regardless.
easyJet did not release a public statement on either U22058 diversion. That is not unusual for incidents resolved without injury. The airline did acknowledge a medically similar event in October 2025, when flight U22238 declared an emergency over the North Sea on the Copenhagen to Manchester route and diverted safely to Newcastle Airport. For U22058, no official airline comment was made public.
Across both incidents in the summer of 2025, two separate crews on two separate dates encountered two genuinely different problems at cruise altitude above France and responded the same way: activate the code, coordinate with air traffic control, and get the aircraft on the ground at the nearest suitable airport. The AAIB found no reason to investigate either event. For everyone on board easyJet U22058 that summer, the flight ended somewhere other than Manchester. For everyone on board, it ended safely.
