Heathrow Airport 'fully operational' after fire shutdown

LONDON: Heathrow Airport said it was "fully operational" on Saturday (Mar 22) but there were some delays and cancellations as Europe's busiest air hub resumed operations a day after a power station fire caused travel mayhem.

The electricity substation blaze knocked out power at the London airport, closing it for most of Friday before some flights began to arrive and take-off later in the evening.

The shutdown affected thousands of passengers around the world and raised serious questions about the reliability of one of the UK's most critical pieces of infrastructure.

"We can confirm that Heathrow is open and fully operational today," an airport spokesperson said on Saturday morning.

"Teams across the airport continue to do everything they can to support passengers impacted by yesterday's outage at an off-airport power substation."

About 1,350 flights were affected by Friday's closure, according to the Flightradar24 tracking website. Around 120 Heathrow-bound planes were in the air when the closure was announced and had to be diverted.

Delays and cancellations were likely throughout Saturday as airlines scrambled to clear a backlog of flights and reposition aircraft and crews.

"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.

British Airways said it expected to operate around 85 per cent 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.

"We expect around 85 per cent of our Saturday Heathrow schedule to run, but it is likely that all travelling customers will experience delays as we continue to navigate the challenges posed by Friday's power outage at the airport."

Virgin Atlantic said in a statement it plans "to run a near full schedule with limited cancellations today".

Travellers appeared jolly as planes took the skies again.

"We feel lucky. It feels everything is running quite smoothly," said 45-year-old Claire Montgomery, whose flight home to Austin, Texas, was scheduled on time.

David Storck, a university professor said it was "miraculous" that his flight to Savannah, in the US state of Georgia, was reported as only five minutes late.

"Everyone's in a positive mood. I was expecting people to be grumbly and sour but I think everyone is just so relieved," he said of the atmosphere.

Restrictions on overnight flights have been temporarily lifted to help ease congestion, according to the UK's transport department.

Around 230,000 passengers use Heathrow every day - 83 million a year - making it one of the world's busiest airports. Planes from Heathrow serve around 80 countries.

"NO INDICATION OF FOUL PLAY"

The scale of the disruption - which saw a back-up transformer fail, meaning systems had to be closed down - raised questions about Heathrow's vulnerability.

Heathrow Airport's chief executive Thomas Woldbye told the BBC he was "proud" of the airport's response and said he would "let others judge" if he should step down.

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".

London's Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorism Command is leading the investigation into the fire given its impact, but said that there was "currently no indication of foul play".

Fire officials said the blaze, which broke out on Thursday night, was "believed to be non-suspicious" and that an investigation would "focus on the electrical distribution equipment".

Around 150 people were evacuated from nearby properties and the outage left 100,000 homes without power for several hours.

Smoke could still be seen coming from the electrical substation on Saturday morning.