Travelers will arrive at Terminal 5 as Heathrow slowly resumes flights after Heathrow cut off firefighters at London’s busiest airport on Saturday. Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP Hide Caption
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
LONDON – London’s Heathrow Airport said it was “fully operational” on Saturday after being closed almost all day after a fire at a current substation. However, the airline warned that serious confusion would last for several days as they were rushing to move planes and crews and take tourists to their destinations.
The airport boss said he was proud of Heathrow’s reaction to the incident. However, inconvenient passengers, angry airlines and officials sought answers on how a seemingly accidental fire would close Europe’s busiest air hub.
“We have hundreds of additional colleagues in the terminal. We have added flights to today’s schedule and added flights to promote the extra 10,000 passengers traveling through the airport,” Heathrow said in a statement, advised passengers to check with the airline before they go to the airport.
British Airways, Heathrow’s largest airline, said it expects to operate around 85% of its 600 scheduled flights at the airport on Saturday. “It is extremely complicated to restore our size operations after such a serious incident,” he said.
More than 1,300 flights have been cancelled, and about 200,000 people were stranded towards more than 60,000 facilities on Friday after a overnight fire at a substation two miles (3.2 km) from the airport, cutting power to Heathrow and stranded towards more than 60,000 facilities.
West London residents have explained that they will see fireballs and clouds of smoke when the flames tore through the substation after hearing the big explosion. The fire was controlled after 7 hours, but the airport was closed for almost 18 minutes. A few flights took off and landed late Friday.
Police said they did not consider the fire to be suspicious, and the London Fire Service said the investigation would focus on the substation’s electrical distribution equipment.
Still, the major impact of the fire left authorities facing criticism that the UK’s creaking infrastructure is not ready to deal with disasters and attacks.
On Friday, March 21, 2025, after closing down Europe’s busiest air travel hub in London, the plane is being prepared while another plane approaches another plane landing at Heathrow Airport.
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Alberto Petzari/AP
The UK government admitted that there are questions the authorities should answer, saying that a rigorous investigation is needed to ensure that “disruption of this magnitude will never happen again.”
Heathrow CEO Thomas Waldy said he was “prideful” at the way airport and airline staff responded.
“Remember, the situation wasn’t created at Heathrow Airport,” he told the BBC. “The airport hasn’t been closed for days. We’ll be closed for hours.”
He said the emergency-designed backup power supply on Heathrow worked as expected, but operating the entire airport wasn’t enough.
“That’s what most airports do,” said Woldbye, who insisted that “the same will happen at other airports.”
Heathrow is one of the busiest airports in the world for international travel, and saw 83.9 million passengers last year.
Around 120 passengers were in the air when the closure was announced, landing in various cities and even different countries.
The turmoil on Friday was one of the most severe since the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eijafjaradjokol volcano, spewing ash clouds into the atmosphere and closing European airspace for days.
Mark Doherty and his wife were mid-Atlantic Ocean when they showed a flight to Heathrow from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York.
“I seemed to be kidding,” Doherty said before the pilot told passengers he was back in New York.
Doherty said this situation was “typical England – we didn’t have a backup plan for anything like this. There’s no emergency plan.”
