A flying instructor from Leigh had to make an emergency landing at Southend Airport after his single engine plane lost all power at 18,000 feet.

Derick Gunning was with two colleagues in the £200,000 six-seater Piper Malibu on a business trip to Colmar near Strasbourg in France when the mid-air drama happened yesterday morning.

The aircraft was just north of Dover at about 7.30am, 15 minutes out of Foulmere aerodrome in Cambridgeshire, when the engine cut out.

The Piper's owner Victor Stekly was flying it at the time and the third man, Ajitpal Singh - a business colleague from Malaysia on his first flight in a small aircraft - was in the back.

But when a warning light sounded, Mr Gunning, 40, who now lives near Cambridge and has 18 years flying experience, took to the controls and turned the plane around.

He described how they then spent a nail-biting 20 minutes gliding the aircraft into Southend.

He said: "There was no huge bang or anything like that. It was quite gentle. I ran through a couple of destinations we could take the plane to and thought of Calais, Biggin Hill, or even Gatwick."

Air traffic controllers directed the plane towards RAF Manston in Kent, but Mr Gunning said he knew Southend Airport much better and told them he was heading there.

He said: "At 18,000 feet you have about 20 minutes to get down and decide where to go.

"The thing about these small aircraft is that you can glide them in. They don't just fall out of the sky."

He added: "I wasn't nervous or scared at the time because I was concentrating. It didn't really hit me until I was down on the ground at Southend."

In the meantime, bosses at Southend Airport launched a full scale alert and nine fire engines were on stand-by ready for an emergency landing.

Mr Gunning said: "We had to circle Southend about four times to get the height down because we were at about 10,000 feet with no power at all."

It was only when the plane dropped to about 8,000 feet that he managed to regain limited power in the engine and make a relatively normal landing.

He believed an iced-up fuel system had caused the engine to cut out.

He said: "The temperature at 18,000 feet is about -39C. The cold temperatures overnight had probably left some ice on it as well. But by the time we were back on the ground we could get full power back."

Mr Stekly had only bought the plane two weeks before and it was the first time he had flown it, said Mr Gunning.

But he revealed: "It was the first time for me that an engine has cut out like that."

The three returned to Foulmere after the plane was given the all-clear by engineers.

The trip to Colmar was been postponed, however.

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