Heathrow rumbles back to life after substation fire shut down airport

LONDON — Heathrow Airport in London was plunged into chaos after a fire at an electrical substation shut down operations at one of Europe’s busiest air hubs, forcing the airport to cancel or divert more than 1,000 flights Friday and removing a global linchpin of air travel.

Heathrow CEO Thomas Woldbye described the disruption as “unprecedented,” telling reporters Friday that the airport had lost power equal to that of a midsize city, and that although a backup transformer worked as it should, there had not been enough power for the entire airport.

Some flights resumed late Friday. But Woldbye said, “We expect to be back in full operation, so 100% operation as a normal day,” by Saturday.

Later Friday, the Metropolitan Police in London said, “After initial assessment, we are not treating this incident as suspicious, although inquiries do remain ongoing.” The police said counterterrorism officials would lead the investigation into the cause of the blaze, which broke out Thursday night at an electrical substation northeast of Heathrow.

It was too early Friday to calculate the precise cost of the disruption. But the outage raised questions about the resilience of Britain’s largest airport and why it appeared to be so reliant on a single electrical substation.

Residents of the Hayes neighborhood near the airport described hearing two loud bangs and seeing “a massive ball of flame” shoot into the sky Thursday night. Minutes later, the airport said it was shutting down all air traffic, incoming flights were diverted, and passengers at Heathrow were sent home. Nearby residents were also evacuated.

By Friday morning, roads around the power station were cordoned off, and a helicopter hovered above. An odd stillness had descended on Heathrow. The runways were empty, check-in desks were quiet, digital flight-information screens were blank and passageways were dimly lit by emergency lighting. It was a lifeless calm not seen even during the early panicked weeks of the coronavirus pandemic.

Britain’s National Grid said Friday afternoon that it had reconfigured its network to partly restore power at Heathrow on an interim basis. The substation held 25,000 liters of cooling oil, which fueled the large blaze and made it too difficult to extinguish, the London Fire Brigade said Friday. The brigade said about 5% of the fire was still burning by Friday evening.

The airport closure resulted in dozens of flights from the United States landing far from their original destination. They were diverted to airports in Glasgow, Scotland; Madrid; and even Happy Valley-Goose Bay, a tiny town in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

John Connor, 22, sat at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey on Friday, waiting in vain to get home to England after backpacking abroad for two years.

“We sat on the plane for about five hours before they said the flight was called off,” he said. “I’m trying to get a plane somewhere close — Paris, Dublin, anywhere else,” he added. “We’re being told straight up no.”

Frantic travelers swarmed social media to ask airlines about managing canceled flights and upcoming departures, claiming in posts on the social platform X that airline apps were lagging in notifying passengers about cancellations and that customer service could not be reached by phone.

Some travelers stuck in Europe were urged to consider traveling by rail. After finding out that his flight from Heathrow was canceled, Phillip Kizun, 58, of Chester County, Pennsylvania, had to improvise as he tried to get from London to Dublin for a work trip. He took a train to Wales and then a ferry from the coastal town of Holyhead to the Irish capital. He met several European and American travelers doing the same.

“It was an absolute real ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles,’” Kizun said, minutes after arriving in Dublin, referring to the 1987 comedy starring Steve Martin and John Candy.

Some planes already in the air had to turn around. Jeannie LaChance, who was traveling to London from Los Angeles with her sister and 2-year-old niece, said that about four hours into the flight, the pilot announced they would have to return.

“Everyone was pretty calm, which I think was nice because we’re all trapped in a plane,” said LaChance, 31.

Some airlines said they would issue waivers allowing free rebookings, including British Airways, Delta Air Lines, American Airlines and United Airlines. A Delta spokesperson said the airline would reimburse the cost of traveling to London by train for passengers who had their flights diverted to Amsterdam.

Cirium, an aviation data company, estimated that as many as 290,000 passengers could be affected by Heathrow’s closure.

By late Friday, several flights had landed at or departed from Heathrow, as the airport began to rumble back to life, about 16 hours after the fire. The first to touch down there was a British Airways plane that had traveled from Gatwick Airport in London after being diverted from its original destination, Singapore, according to the flight-tracking service FlightAware.

A Heathrow spokesperson said the airport was working to first restore “repatriation flights and relocating aircraft.”

Britain’s Department of Transport said it was temporarily lifting restrictions on overnight flights to ease congestion.

But British Airways CEO Sean Doyle warned that Heathrow’s closure would have “a huge impact” on the airline’s customers over the coming days. British Airways had been set to operate more than 670 flights carrying about 107,000 customers Friday, and similar numbers were planned over the weekend, he added.

“We have flight and cabin crew colleagues and planes that are currently at locations where we weren’t planning on them to be,” he said.

The Heathrow crisis was likely to upset not only the movement of people, but the flow of goods. The closure of the crucial aviation hub, even for a short time, would cause delays and logistical headaches for many businesses that ship products through Heathrow, supply chain experts said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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