Heathrow Airport said it was “fully operational” on Saturday, March 22, but passengers faced some delays and cancellations as Europe’s busiest air hub resumed operations a day after a power station fire caused travel mayhem. On Friday, the electricity substation blaze had knocked out power at the London airport, closing it for most of the day before some flights began to arrive and take off later in the evening. The shutdown affected thousands of passengers around the world and raised serious questions about the reliability of one of the UK’s most critical pieces of infrastructure.
“We can confirm that Heathrow is open and fully operational today,” an airport spokesperson said early on Saturday. “Teams across the airport continue to do everything they can to support passengers impacted by yesterday’s outage at an off-airport power substation.” “We have hundreds of additional colleagues on hand in our terminals and we have added flights to today’s schedule to facilitate an extra 10,000 passengers travelling through the airport,” the spokesperson said.
Around 230,000 passengers use Heathrow every day – 83 million a year – making it one of the world’s busiest airports. Planes from Heathrow serve around 80 countries. About 1,350 flights were affected by Friday’s closure, according to the Flightradar24 tracking website. Around 120 Heathrow-bound planes were in the air when the closure was announced and had to be diverted.
Delays and cancellations were likely throughout Saturday as airlines scrambled to clear a backlog of flights and reposition aircraft and crews. The UK government temporarily lifted restrictions on overnight flights to help ease congestion.
British Airways said it expected to operate around 85% of its scheduled flights at the airport throughout the day. The airline would normally run about 600 arrivals and departures on a Saturday. “We are planning to operate as many flights as possible to and from Heathrow on Saturday, but to recover an operation of our size after such a significant incident is extremely complex,” a BA spokesperson said. “We expect around 85% of our Saturday Heathrow schedule to run, but it is likely that all travelling customers will experience delays as we continue to navigate the challenges posed by Friday’s power outage at the airport.”
Virgin Atlantic said in a statement it plans “to run a near full schedule with limited cancellations today.”
‘No indication of foul play’
The scale of the disruption – which saw a back-up transformer fail, meaning systems had to be closed down – raised questions about Heathrow’s vulnerability.
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Heathrow Airport’s chief executive Thomas Woldbye told the BBC he was “proud” of the airport’s response and said he would “let others judge” if he should step down.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband ordered the National Energy System Operator, which operates Britain’s electricity grid, to “urgently investigate” the incident. “The government is determined to do everything it can to prevent a repeat of what happened,” he said in a statement.
London’s Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command is leading the investigation into the fire given its impact, but said that there was “currently no indication of foul play.”
Fire officials said the blaze, which broke out on Thursday night, was “believed to be non-suspicious” and that an investigation would “focus on the electrical distribution equipment.”
