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 suspension “unprecedented” and told reporters Friday that the airport lost power to medium-sized cities and that the backup transformer was working fine, but it wasn't enough to power the entire airport.
But he said, “We expect to go back to full operation, so we expect to run 100% on a normal day.”
British authorities said counter-terrorism police will lead an investigation into the cause of the flames that erupted at the North Hyde current substation northeast of Heathrow. However, London Metropolitan Police said later Friday that “we have not treated the incident as suspicious after the initial assessment, but the investigation is ongoing.”
It was too early on Friday to calculate the exact cost of the outage. However, the outage raised questions about the resilience of the UK's largest 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 London Fire Service said in the afternoon that 10% of the fires are still on fire, but that is under control.
The closure has 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 to the UK by train. A Delta spokesperson said the airline will refund the costs of traveling to London on trains for passengers who diverted their flights to Amsterdam.
By Friday morning, only a few British Airlines passengers had remained camp at Terminal 8 at New York's Kennedy International Airport. After arranging for a new trip, some waited for their cars to take them to a nearby hotel. Others said they plan to spend the whole day at the terminal on Friday.
Some airlines affected by the suspension said they would issue a waiver that would allow free rebooking, including British Airways, Delta, American Airlines and United Airlines. Aviation data company Cirium estimated that as many as 290,000 passengers could be affected by the Heathrow closure.
By the end of Friday, several flights had landed at Heathrow as the airport began to revive about 16 hours after the fire. The first place to land was a British Airways plane. According to flight tracking service FlightAware, after being spitted out there from its original destination, Singapore, he arrived from London's Gatwick airport and didn't go far.
A Heathrow spokesperson said the airport was working to recover “repatriation flights and aircraft relocation” first. Authorities said airlines will relocate planes and crews and bring flights that will be converted to other cities as a priority.
The UK Department of Transport said it is temporarily lifting overnight flight restrictions to facilitate crowding while Heathrow Airport resumes normal operations.
However, British Airways CEO Sean Doyle previously 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 disrupt people's movements as well as product flows. Such crucial aviation hub closures will cause delays and logistical headaches for many businesses shipping their products through Heathrow for some time, supply chain experts said.
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 flew through 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.”
British companies will likely be the most affected, experts said. Global trade can be processed at other large airports in Europe, according to Eytan Buchman, chief marketing officer at Freightos, a digital shipping market. “This is likely to be a localized issue rather than a broader European or global issue,” he said.
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. However, he said such confusion “has never happened before.”
The closure of Heathrow comes 15 years after one of Europe's most serious air travel disruptions, when volcanic eruptions in Iceland sent miles of ashes into the sky, disrupting the travel of millions, including Heathrow.
Ash Cloud grounded over 100,000 flights over nearly a week in April 2010, crossing Northern Europe, including the UK Channel. The losses to the aviation industry due to the volcanic disruption were estimated at $1.7 billion.
Report contributed Christine Chun, Michael Levenson, Michael D. Shea, Peter Evis, Christopher Maag, Ivan Penn, Stephen Castle, Niraji Chokushi, Saylan Yeynes and Claire Moses.
