Passengers onboard a Gatwick-bound flat were left in a “state of panic” by a giant sign someone had laid out on the approach to the airport saying “Welcome to Luton”.

Luckily for passengers, the message was a prank rather than an indication of their location.

Abbey Desmond spotted the oversized letters from her Mexico-London flight and tweeted a picture of it.

“Flying in to Gatwick, just before landing this is what is out the left window… great prank, deffo at Gatwick,” she captioned the photo.

She told ITV: “We were about to land and in a state of panic until staff confirmed on landing we were actually at Gatwick,” adding, “Nothing makes for a stress-free arrival in the UK quite like the words Welcome to Luton currently spelled out in giant white letters in a field under the final approach to Gatwick Airport.”

The heartstopping sign was allegedly the work of prankster Max Fosh, who retweeted Abbey’s picture with one word: “Guilty...”.

“It’s my job to make videos and my videos are all about doing silly things, to put a smile on people’s faces but just to be silly, I’m glad this stunt has gone down well,” he told BBC Three Counties Radio.

Mr Fosh said the stunt had cost him around £4,000 to implement - he found the owners of a field near the airport by knocking on doors in the local area.

“A lovely couple said, ‘yeah we’ve got an 80-metre-long patch of land we don’t have any use for’, so I said ‘great can I get my tarpaulin out and start hammering pegs into the ground?’”

Gatwick passengers beware: the misleading sign is likely to be in place for another six weeks.

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