London’s Heathrow Airport was in chaos after a fire broke out in closure work at an electric substation in one of Europe’s busiest air hubs, and the airport cancelled or diverted more than 1,000 flights on Friday, removing air travel around the world.
Heathrow’s chief executive Thomas Waldy called the disruption “unprecedented” and told reporters Friday that the airport lost power to medium-sized cities and that the backup transformer operated as needed, but the entire airport didn’t have enough power.
Some flights resumed late Friday. But Woldbye said by Saturday, “We’re back to full operation, so we hope to run 100% as a normal day.”
London Metropolitan Police said later Friday that “we have not treated the incident as suspicious after the initial assessment, but the investigation is ongoing.” Police said counter-terrorism authorities will lead an investigation into the cause of the flames.
It was too early on Friday to calculate the exact cost of the outage. However, the confusion has raised questions about the resilience of the UK’s biggest airport and why it appears to be highly dependent on a single current.
Residents in the Hayes area near the airport said they heard two big bangs on Thursday night and saw a “giant ball of flame” shot into the sky. A few minutes later, the airport closed all air traffic, and incoming flights were diverted and Heathrow passengers said they had returned home. Nearby residents also evacuated.
By Friday morning, roads around the power plant had been blocked and helicopters had floated up. A strange silence descended upon Heathrow. The runway was empty, the check-in desk was quiet, the digital flight information screen was blank, and the passageway was dimmed by emergency lighting. It was a lively, calm that was not seen even in the early panic weeks of the coronavirus pandemic.
UK National Grid said on Friday afternoon it had reconfigured its network to partially restore power to Heathrow. The substation held 25,000 liters of cooling oil, making it difficult to extinguish large flames, the London Fire Service said on Friday. The brigade said about 5% of the fires were still burning by Friday evening.
The airport closures have resulted in dozens of flights from the US, far from its original destination. They detoured to Glasgow, the airport in Madrid, and even Happy Valley Goose Bay, a small Canadian town in Newfoundland and Labrador.
John Connor, 22, sat at Newar Liberty International Airport in New Jersey on Friday, waiting in vain to return to England after two years of backpacking abroad.
“We sat on the plane for about five hours before they said the flight was being cancelled,” he said. “I’m trying to get a plane somewhere nearby, Paris, Dublin, elsewhere,” he added. “We are said straight.”
The desperate traveler flocked to social media to inquire about the airline’s cancellation flights and future departures, claiming that the airline’s app notified passengers about the cancellation and did not reach customer service on the phone.
Some travelers stuck in Europe were urged to consider traveling by train. After learning that his flight from Heathrow had been cancelled, Philip Kizun, 58, of Chester County, Pennsylvania, had to improvise as he tried to go from London to Dublin for public eating. He took a train to Wales, then a ferry from the coastal town of Hollyhead to the Irish capital. He met European and American travelers doing the same thing.
“It was an absolute ‘plane, a train, a car,’ Kitsun said a few minutes after he arrived in Dublin, referring to the 1987 Steve Martin John Candy comedy.
Some planes already in the air had to turn around. Jeannie Lachance, who was traveling from Los Angeles to London with her sister and 2-year-old nie, said about four hours after the flight, the pilot announced that he had to go back.
“Everyone was pretty calm. I think it’s fine because we’re all trapped in the plane,” said Lachance, 31.
Some airlines said they will issue waives that allow free rebooking, including British Airways, Delta Air Lines, American Airlines and United Airlines. A Delta spokesperson said the airline will refund the costs of traveling to London on trains for passengers who diverted their flights to Amsterdam.
Aviation data company Cirium estimated that as many as 290,000 passengers could be affected by the Heathrow closure.
By the end of Friday, some flights had landed or departed at Heathrow as the airport began to revive about 16 hours after the fire. According to Flight-Tracking Service’s Flightaware, the first landing was a British Airways plane travelling from London’s Gatwick Airport after being repurposed from its original destination, Singapore.
A Heathrow spokesperson said the airport was first working to restore “repatriation flights and aircraft relocation.”
The UK Department of Transport said it is temporarily lifting temporary flight restrictions to facilitate crowding.
However, British Airways CEO Shawn Doyle warned that the closure of Heathrow would have a “significant impact” on airline customers in the coming days. British Airways is scheduled to operate more than 670 flights on Friday with around 107,000 customers, with similar numbers planned for the weekend, he added.
“We have flights and airplanes with colleagues from the cabin crew and we are in a place where we didn’t plan them now,” he said.
The Heathrow crisis could unsettle people’s movements as well as the flow of goods. Supply chain experts say that closures of key aviation hubs will cause delays and logistical headaches for many businesses shipping their products through Hathrow, even in the short term.
Heathrow has two runways and four terminals serving more than 230 destinations in 90 countries. Last year, around 83.9 million passengers and 1.7 million tonnes of cargo crossed the airport. This is the third largest hub in Western Europe measured in meter-ricktons shipped. In 2023, £20 billion worth of goods ($258 billion) passed Heathrow, roughly a fifth of the UK’s commodity trade.
“We’re looking forward to seeing you in a way that’s why we’re so excited to be able to help you,” said Ben Farrell, CEO of the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply, a global network of London-based supply chain experts. “Confusion in that part leads to knock-on effects elsewhere.”
UK businesses will likely be the most affected. Global trade can be processed at other large airports in Europe, according to Eytan Buchman, chief marketing officer at Freightos, a digital shipping market.
Woldbye, CEO of Heathrow, apologized to travelers for the closure and said the airport had done well to resume flights by Friday evening, considering the scale of the suspension.
The airport closure 15 years after one of Europe’s most severe air travel disruptions, a volcanic eruption in Iceland sent mile of ash into the sky, disrupting travel for millions, including Heathrow.
The ashes drifted across Northern Europe in April 2010, resulting in over 100,000 flights over a week. The losses to the aviation industry due to the volcanic disruption were estimated at $1.7 billion.
Reports include Christine Chun, Michael Levenson, Michael D. Shear, Peter Evis, Christopher Maagh, Ivan Penn, Stephen Castle, Niraj Choksi, Seylan Jens, Claire Moses, John Yun and Kasim Nauman.
