LONDON: 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.
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.
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