A jumbo jet forced into an emergency landing was seen flying “alarmingly low” over the skies of Thames Ditton on Saturday morning.

Residents described how they were woken by the deafening noise of the British Airways jet holding 296 passengers heading back in to Heathrow just after 9.30am.

The Boeing 747, destined for New York, was forced to turn minutes after take off from Heathrow Airport and head back to land after a light in the cockpit indicated that one of the doors was not completely closed.

The handle of the door was not securely fastened.

The pilot's low altitude manoeuvre to turn flight number BA117 around and land it back at the west London airport was witnessed by residents in Thames Ditton.

One Thames Ditton resident was already outside his house with a camera when the plane flew past.

He said: “It can’t have been more than a thousand feet above us - it was flying really amazingly low.

“We all thought it was going to crash land in Bushy Park. I heard about the incident later on the news.

“We don’t get many aeroplanes flying over us. It was on a really alien route.”

A spokesperson for BA said she did not know at what altitude the plane was forced to turn but that the jet had not reached its full altitude for the flight.

The plane was only in the air for 11 minutes.

She said the flight landed safely back at the west London airport in a "controlled manner".

Although the warning light had gone on because the handle of the door was not properly fastened, she said the door was securely shut and there was no way it could have opened during the flight.

BA flew the affected passengers, who had all safely left the plane, from Heathrow to New York on a different jet later that afternoon, the spokesperson confirmed.