LONDON - Heathrow Airport said it was “fully operational” on Saturday, a day after a fire knocked out its power supply and shut Europe’s busiest airport, causing global travel chaos.
Some flights resumed on Friday evening, but the shuttering of the world’s fifth-busiest airport for most of the day left tens of thousands searching for scarce hotel rooms and replacement seats while airlines tried to return jets and crew to bases.
Teams were working across the airport to support passengers affected by the outage, a Heathrow spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
“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.
The travel industry, facing the prospect of a financial hit costing tens of millions of pounds and a likely fight over who should pay, questioned how such crucial infrastructure could fail without backup.
“It is a clear planning failure by the airport,” said Willie Walsh, head of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) who, as a former head of British Airways, has for years been a fierce critic of the crowded hub.
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.
Around 120 Heathrow-bound planes were in the air when the closure was announced and had to be diverted, according to the Flightradar24 tracking website.
British Airways said it expected to operate around 85 percent 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.
Restrictions on overnight flights were temporarily lifted by Britain’s Department of Transport to ease congestion, but BA chief executive Sean Doyle said the closure was set to have a “huge impact on all of our customers flying with us over the coming days”.
Virgin Atlantic said it expected to operate “a near full schedule” with limited cancellations on Saturday but that the situation remained dynamic and all flights would be kept under continuous review.
Heathrow Airport chief executive Thomas Woldbye apologised to stranded passengers and defended the airport’s response to the situation, saying it was like losing power “equal to that of a mid-sized city”.
“We cannot guard ourselves 100 percent,” he added.
Asked who would pay for the disruption, he said there were “procedures in place”, adding “we don’t have liabilities in place for incidents like this”.
UK Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said the government would “need to understand what caused an incident of this magnitude at an electricity substation that is very close to a critical piece of national infrastructure”. (Story continues below)
Firefighters and investigators inspect the electrical substation where a fire wiped out the power at Heathrow International Airport, in Hayes, England, on March 21. (Photo: Reuters)
Aviation experts said the last time European airports experienced disruption on such a large scale was the 2010 Icelandic volcanic ash cloud that grounded 100,000 flights.
They 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 ($645), roughly five times the normal price levels.
Police said that after an initial assessment, they were not treating the incident at the power substation as suspicious, although inquiries were ongoing. London Fire Brigade said its investigations would focus on the electrical distribution equipment.
Around 150 people were evacuated from nearby properties on Friday and the outage left 100,000 homes without power for several hours.
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.