LONDON - The closure of Heathrow Airport is set to affect the global aviation system for days at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, experts say, posing questions about why better contingency planning was not in place at the hub.
Experts were in shock at the scale of the outage, which has not been seen since the Icelandic ash cloud of 2010, as they tried to estimate the cost and breadth of the repercussions caused by a fire at a nearby electrical substation that knocked out the airport’s power supply and its backup power.
Heathrow processes around 1,300 flights a day, according to Eurocontrol. The blaze, which was reported just after 2300 GMT on Thursday, forced planes to divert to airports across Britain and Europe, while many long-haul flights simply returned to their point of departure.
The cost of the impact could total around £20 million ($26 million) a day, said Paul Charles, a travel consultant, with no guarantee that Heathrow will reopen on Saturday given the vulnerability of the airport’s power supply.
“A backup should be failsafe in the event of the core system being affected. Heathrow is such a vital piece of the UK’s infrastructure that it should have failsafe systems,” Charles told Reuters.
Energy Minister Ed Miliband said the fire had prevented the power backup system from working and that engineers were working to deploy a third backup mechanism, adding the government was working to understand “what, if any, lessons it has for our infrastructure”.
Experts pointed to potential weakness in Heathrow’s backup plans.
“(An) airport will have multiple electrical routes to feed it and to see them all wiped out is highly unusual,” Tim Green, head of the department for electrical and electronic engineering at Imperial College London, told Sky News
“It will have backup generators, but I imagine you can’t run the whole of the airport’s operations and take incoming flights on the backup generators.”
Tony Cox, an international risk management consultant, said: “I can’t remember a piece of critical infrastructure being wholly shut down for at least a day because of a fire. I can’t think of anything comparable.”
The closure is set to have days-long knock-on effects globally, leaving airline passengers stranded as carriers reconfigure their networks to move planes and crews around. (Story continues below)
Canadian traveller Carol Ye checks her phone for information as she waits to fly to Toronto via Heathrow Airport, at Fiumicino Airport in Rome on March 21. (Photo: Reuters)
Clearing the backlog
Karen Dee, the chief executive of the trade group Airlines UK, said the focus for now should remain on clearing the backlog.
“The main priority for everyone at the moment is dealing with the operational challenges and restoring a normal service as quickly as possible,” she said in a statement.
Independent air transport consultant John Strickland said: “There will be impact running on several days because once aircraft are grounded somewhere away from an operation, they are stuck there with the crews operating the flights, and of course the customers, until those crews have been out to have the legally required rest periods.”
This is not the first aviation sector outage in Britain that has raised concern across the industry.
An outage of Britain’s air traffic control system NATS in 2023 cost over £100 million, according to an independent review by Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority, raising questions about the stability of the system.
The Heathrow outage, especially if it drags on past Friday, is likely to lead to extensive public scrutiny.
Under EU and British rules, customers are entitled to up to €600 from airlines for delays of three hours, or cancellations, as well as paid hotel stays and food, but only if the airline is at fault. In this case, the airlines are not at fault.
Most airlines are likely to offer the option of rerouting or a refund for a flight with some support for accommodation for those stranded by the shutdown.
While airlines are likely to offer these benefits in the interest of customer service, one can expect drawn out negotiations about who should fund the cost of the disruption and if others should repay airlines for fronting the bill.
“Who actually picks up the bill … remains to be seen because it will be a complex discussion and a heavy discussion certainly between the airport, the airlines, the electricity providers, insurance companies, of course, nobody will want to accept responsibility if it’s possible not to,” Strickland added. (Story continues below)
Smoke rises from a fire at the North Hyde Electricity Substation, which wiped out power and closed Heathrow Airport, in Hayes, England, on March 21. (Photo: Reuters)
Searching for a cause
London firefighters, meanwhile, were working with police to investigate the cause of the blaze, a firefighting chief told reporters.
Huge orange flames and plumes of black smoke shot into the sky around 11pm on Thursday as a blaze engulfed the substation.
“The fire involved a transformer comprising 25,000 litres of cooling oil fully alight,” said Jonathan Smith deputy commissioner at the London Fire Brigade.
“This created a major hazard due to the still live high voltage equipment and the nature of the oil-fuelled fire.”
Miliband said earlier on Friday there was no suggestion that there was foul play involved.
Asked whether police were investigating the cause of the fire as a possible terrorist incident, Smith said he was unable to comment.
“All I can say, is the Metropolitan Police are investigating the cause of this fire, ably assisted by our fire investigation officers,” he said.
Smith said on Friday afternoon that 10% of the original fire remained alight and his officers were working to safely resolve the incident, adding that they would work with National Grid as they assess the site and attempt to restore power.