London's Heathrow Airport resumed full operations on Saturday, a day after a fire knocked out its power supply and shut Europe's busiest airport, causing global travel chaos.
The travel industry was scrambling to reroute passengers and fix battered airline schedules after the huge fire at an electrical substation serving the airport.
Some flights had 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 traveling 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 global airlines body IATA, who, as 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.
Heathrow Chief Executive Thomas Woldbye said he expected the airport to be back "in full operation" on Saturday.
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".
Restrictions on overnight flights were temporarily lifted by Britain's Department of Transport to ease congestion, but British Airways 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.
Airlines including JetBlue, American Airlines, Air Canada, Air India, Delta Air Lines, Qantas, United Airlines, British Airways and Virgin were diverted or returned to their origin airports in the wake of the closure, according to data from flight analytics firm Cirium.
Shares in many airlines fell on Friday.
Aviation 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.
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 pounds ($645), roughly five times the normal price levels.
Police said after an initial assessment, they were not treating the incident at the power substation as suspicious, although enquiries remained ongoing. London Fire Brigade said its investigations would focus on the electrical distribution equipment.
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.
© Thomson Reuters 2025.
3 Comments
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itsonlyrocknroll
I am reading that the airport "bosses" are attempting to blame one errant "sparky" with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers.
It is so ruthlessly cynically deceitful, the fibble refusal to take responsibility.
First the Post Office,
Now the global Heathrow airport transport hubs
GBR48
LHR has 3 substations. Apparently it can work off 2, but they have to tweak the supply. And they have to turn it off to do that.
It's not like the 1980s when we just grumbled a bit and got on with stuff. Everything in the UK now has health and safety procedures, so if something goes pop, everything usually shuts and the public are turfed out.
As an example, if the computer network in a school goes down, the school closes, because the computers control doors, access cards and CCTV and safeguarding rules demand that without them the school can't function. Even if the teachers can teach, the pupils are there and the lights are on.
The fire may have been caused by persistently high demands on the substation (an issue flagged in 2022). An update was planned, but no date was given. In the UK, water, sewage, gas and electricity services are privatised, which influences their budgets. The fire is likely to have been a component failure, which happens. Large transformers are oil cooled and the oil caught fire.
The hotel room prices may have gone up due to dynamic pricing. Lots of demand, so the software upped the price. It might be useful to legally permit a maximum % rise when that happens.
Heathrow might also want to purchase a nearby warehouse for emergency accommodation, for when this happens. Those cardboard beds from Narita etc. Airport travel is very different to most travel, so all airports should have some space available.
The UK has plenty of airport capacity to deal with such closures (including the currently mothballed Doncaster Sheffield Airport), but probably needs to co-ordinate it better.
Given how awful our train service now is, and the endless apps you need to drive and park anywhere, the persistent malware attacks and spiralling costs, this is just a bit more crap on the pile. But really annoying for anyone caught up in it.
In future, given that we are lot more third world now, they may need to ease up on the health and safety requirements, as stuff is going to be conking out a lot more in the future. Certainly anything reliant on digital systems is a lot less resilient.
Desert Tortoise
I lived across the street from a big LADWP switchyard most of my life until I joined the Navy. It didn't happen often but I can recall a couple of big transformer explosions. They are pretty exciting O_O It wasn't an old facility either. I was in elementary school when it was built and the first explosion I recall was during junior high school. The TV fuzzed and by the time I got out of my chair to see what was up (this was before TV remotes, and the antenna were rabbit ears on top of the set ) KA-BOOM. Ran out front with my parents to see a big orange mushroom cloud heading skyward. Clear night, not particularly hot. Never heard why it happened.