Flights at London’s Heathrow airport began resuming late on Friday after a fire knocked out its power supply and shut Europe’s busiest airport for the day, stranding thousands of passengers and causing travel turmoil worldwide.
Heathrow said its teams had worked tirelessly to reopen the airport after it was forced to close when a fire engulfed a substation near the airport facility on Thursday night, with travellers told to stay away.
The airport, the world’s fifth-busiest, had been due to handle 1,351 flights on Friday, flying up to 291,000 passengers, but planes were diverted to other airports in Britain and across Europe, while many long-haul flights returned to their point of departure.
Heathrow said there would be a limited number of flights on Friday, mostly focused on relocating aircraft and bringing planes into London.
New American weirdness: Trump contemplates paving paradise as Obama indulges his basketball obsession
George Foreman: A life in pictures
Opinion: OpenAI’s short story about grief has critics in floods of tears or outrage. They’re all missing the point
Miriam Lord: Sharon Keogan ‘our maga woman in the Seanad now known as Agent Orange’
“Tomorrow [Saturday] morning, we expect to be back in full operation, to 100 per cent operation as a normal day,” said Heathrow chief executive Thomas Woldbye. “What I’d like to do is to apologise to the many people who have had their travel affected ...we are very sorry about all the inconvenience.”
Police said that while there was no indication of foul play, counter-terrorism officers were leading the inquiries, given their capabilities and the critical nature of the infrastructure.
[ Heathrow airport closure: How are Irish passengers affected?Opens in new window ]
The closure not only caused misery for travellers but provoked anger from airlines, which questioned how such crucial infrastructure could fail.
The industry faces the prospect of a financial hit costing tens of millions of pounds, and a likely fight over who should pay. “You would think they would have significant back-up power,” said one top executive from a European airline.
Mr Woldbye said back-up systems and procedures had worked as they should.
“This [power supply] is a bit of a weak point,” he told reporters outside the airport. “But of course contingencies of certain sizes we cannot guard ourselves against 100 per cent and this is one of them.”
[ Heathrow cancellations Q&A: what are my rights and options and how do I claim?Opens in new window ]
Asked who would pay, he said there were “procedures in place”, adding “we don’t have liabilities in place for incidents like this”.
British transport minister Heidi Alexander said the incident had been out of Heathrow’s control.
“They have stood up their resilience plans very swiftly and have been working in close collaboration with all the emergency responders and the airline operators,” she told reporters. “There are no suggestions at the moment of foul play, but you will appreciate the investigation keeps an open mind.”
Airlines including JetBlue, American Airlines, Air Canada, Air India, Delta Air Lines, Qantas, United Airlines, IAG-owned British Airways and Virgin were diverted or returned to their origin airports in the middle of the night, according to data from flight analytics firm Cirium.
All 34 scheduled flights between Heathrow and Ireland – 17 inbound and 17 outbound – were cancelled on Friday, but Aer Lingus said it planned to run a full schedule on Saturday.
Aviation experts said the last time European airports experienced disruption on such a large scale was the 2010 Icelandic volcanic ash cloud that grounded some 100,000 flights.
While flights are restarting, it was set to be some time before all scheduled passenger services returned to normal.
“We have flight and cabin crew colleagues and planes that are currently at locations where we weren’t planning on them to be,” said Sean Doyle, chief executive of British Airways, the biggest carrier at Heathrow which had 341 flights scheduled to land there on Friday.
“Unfortunately, it will have a huge impact on all of our customers flying with us over the coming days.”
[ Heathrow airport closed: Are you a passenger affected by the disruption?Opens in new window ]
The fire brigade said the cause of the fire was not known, but that 25,000 litres of cooling oil in the substation’s transformer had caught fire. By morning the transformer could be seen smouldering, doused in white firefighting foam.
Passengers stranded in London and facing the prospect of days of disruptions were scrambling to make alternate travel arrangements.
“It’s pretty stressful,” said Robyn Autry (39), a professor, who had been due to fly home to New York. “I’m worried about how much is it going to cost me to fix this.”
Prices at hotels around Heathrow jumped, with booking sites offering rooms for £500 (€600), roughly five times the normal price levels.
Airline executives, electrical engineers and passengers questioned how Britain’s gateway to the world could be forced to close by one fire, however large.
Heathrow, and London’s other major airports, have been hit by other outages in recent years, most recently by an automated gate failure and an air traffic system meltdown, both in 2023.
Philip Ingram, a former intelligence officer in the British military, said Heathrow’s inability to keep operating exposed vulnerability in Britain’s critical national infrastructure. “It is a wake-up call,” he said. “There is no way that Heathrow should be taken out completely because of a failure in one power substation.”
Willie Walsh, the head of the global airlines body Iata and a former head of British Airways, said Heathrow had once again let passengers down.
Heathrow said it had diesel generators and uninterruptible power supplies in place to land aircraft and evacuate passengers safely. Those systems all operated as expected. But with the airport consuming as much energy as a small city, it said it could not run all its operations safely on back-up systems.
Prime minister Keir Starmer’s spokesman said there were questions to answer about how the incident occurred and there would be a thorough investigation. − Reuters
