What is happening with this aborted flight? 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
It wasn't "circling around a built up area" - it was placed into a holding pattern.

At this point we can only speculate, but holding patterns are exactly as the name implies - aeroplanes obviously can't pull over and stop like a car can, so a holding pattern is a known position where they can just fly around without causing problems for other air traffic.

It could have been to sort something out on the ground, it could have been to give the pilots time to diagnose or work on the issue, it could have been giving time for the airport to handle the unexpected arrival.

It's next to impossible to guess - the only one I'd rule out is burning fuel as they look to have only done three patterns which is nowhere near enough to burn useful quantities of fuel.