I live near Southend airport in the UK (SEN, EGMC) and noticed a strange behaviour of a cargo jet that does daily trips to Spain. It started out on runway 05, took a normal departure until it turned around 5 minutes later. Then it started circling the airport at 4,000' three times, before descending to 2000', switching direction and finally landing on runway 05.
The flight was obviously diverted back to Southend (it did leave an hour later) but given time was 0030-0100 local time, and it was quite noisy, can anyone think of a reason why it would repeatedly circle round a built up area so many times?
https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/g-powp#24941d80
edit:
There was a report on a local facebook group that it had lost communication, but its squawk didn't change to 7600