By Kate Holton, Sarah Young and Andrew MacAskill
LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s Heathrow said flights would resume later 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 world’s fifth-busiest airport after it was forced to close entirely after a huge fire engulfed a substation near the airport on Thursday night, with travellers told to stay away.
The airport 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.
“We’re now safely able to restart flights, prioritising repatriation and relocation of aircraft,” Heathrow said in a statement on X.
“We hope to run a full operation tomorrow and will provide further information shortly. We apologise for the inconvenience caused by this incident.”
The closure not only caused misery for travellers but provoked anger from airlines who questioned how such crucial infrastructure could fail.
The industry is now facing 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,” one top executive from a European airline told Reuters.
NO INDICATION OF FOUL PLAY
Police said that while there was no indication of foul play, they retained an open mind and counter-terrorism officers would lead the inquiries, given their capabilities and the critical nature of the infrastructure.
As the scale of the outage became clear, 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.
Airline 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.
Some airlines such as United Airlines and Air Canada said they expected flights to be able to depart for Heathrow late on Friday, to arrive on Saturday morning, and eight long-haul BA flights will leave Heathrow on Friday evening.
But it will be some time before passenger services return to normal as staff and planes will now be out of position.
British Airways, the biggest carrier at Heathrow which had 341 flights scheduled to land there on Friday, said the situation was unprecedented.
“We have flight and cabin crew colleagues and planes that are currently at locations where we weren’t planning on them to be,” British Airways Chief Executive Sean Doyle told reporters.
“Unfortunately, it will have a huge impact on all of our customers flying with us over the coming days.”
Shares in many airlines, including U.S. carriers, fell.
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,” 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.”
Industry experts warned that some passengers forced to land in Europe may have to stay in transit lounges if they lack the paperwork to leave the airport.
Prices at hotels around Heathrow jumped, with booking sites offering rooms for 500 pounds ($645), roughly five times the normal price levels.
A WAKE-UP CALL
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.
Pictures on social media showed the airport terminals in near darkness during the night, and British energy minister Ed Miliband said it appeared that the “catastrophic” fire had prevented the power back-up system from working.
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 told Reuters. “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.
“How is it that critical infrastructure – of national and global importance – is totally dependent on a single power source without an alternative,” he said.
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.
(Reporting by Angela Christy, Surbhi Misra, Devika Madhusudhanan Nair and Gnaneshwar Rajan in Bengaluru, Jamie Freed in Sydney, Dan Catchpole in Seattle, Abhijit Ganapavaram in New Delhi, Joanna Plucinska, Muvija M, Catarina Demony, Andrew MacAskill in London, Tim Hepher in Paris, writing by Kate Holton and Michael Holden, Editing by Christopher Cushing, Raju Gopalakrishnan, Catherine Evans, Joe Bavier and Alison Williams, Kirsten Donovan)
