PASSENGERS endured a four-hour mid-air scare after a plane part was installed upside down.

Sussex was at the centre of the drama when the Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 was forced to make an emergency landing at Gatwick.

The plane left Gatwick for Las Vegas at 11.44am but suffered mechanical problems with its landing gear.

It reached the west coast of England before turning back for Sussex, where it circled above Brighton and Newhaven while periodically dumping fuel over the English Channel.

On its way to the county it reportedly flew as low as 2,000 feet past Southampton Airport so air- traffic controllers could assess its condition.

It eventually landed at 3.40pm and none of the 447 passengers or 18 crew were hurt.

The incident happened on December 29 last year but the details have now come to light in a report by the Air Accidents Investigations Branch (AAIB).

Their investigation revealed that a part was in the wrong place and this meant the plane’s landing gear could not be deployed.

It said part of the right wing landing gear had been “incorrectly installed” by ground crews and a piece of it had fallen off during the incident.

It meant the pilot had to land with one of the plane’s five sets of landing gears not working.

The report said problems emerged shortly after the plane took off, with a loss of pressure to the landing gear hydraulic systems.

The plane prepared to return to Gatwick but the landing gear would not lock down.

Several unsuccessful attempts were made to drop the wheels before pilot David Williams eventually landed.

The report said the plane had a history of hydraulic fluid leakage from the landing gear and engineers had found it hard to repair a fault on the day before the incident because they could not get access to specialist tools they needed.

The equipment they needed to install into the landing gear was an actuator, which is very heavy.

The report said: “Ultimately the maintenance team... elected not to use any form of mechanical support, thus greatly increasing the difficulty and risk associated with installing the replacement actuator.

“The result of this decision was that the task became so physically demanding that the maintenance team became entirely focused on just attaching the actuator to the aircraft, in order to relieve themselves of the 85kg weight they had manually supported for over 30 minutes.

"As such, they had no remaining capacity to ensure they installed the actuator in the correct orientation.

“It was subsequently determined that they had rotated it 180° about its long axis during installation, effectively installing it upside down.”

The AAIB has recommended changes to the design of the plane’s wing landing gear door mechanism and alterations to its maintenance manual for ground crews.