Heathrow shutdown raises concerns over contingency planning

LONDON: The closure of Britain's Heathrow Airport is set to affect the global aviation system for days at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, experts say, posing questions about why better contingency planning was not in place at the hub.

Experts were in shock at the scale of the outage, which has not been seen since the Icelandic ash cloud of 2010, as they tried to estimate the cost and breadth of the repercussions caused by a fire at a nearby electrical substation that knocked out the airport's power supply and its back-up power.

The chaos delivered a vivid demonstration of the vulnerability of critical infrastructure at a time when security has risen to the top of the European agenda.

Heathrow processes around 1,300 flights a day, according to Eurocontrol. The blaze, which was reported just after 11pm, on Thursday (Mar 20) (Friday, 7am, Singapore time), forced planes to divert to airports across Britain and Europe, while many long-haul flights simply returned to their point of departure.

The cost of the impact could total around £20 million (S$26 million) a day, said Paul Charles, a travel consultant, with no guarantee that Heathrow will reopen on Saturday given the vulnerability of the airport's power supply.

"A back-up should be failsafe in the event of the core system being affected. Heathrow is such a vital piece of the UK's infrastructure that it should have failsafe systems," Charles told Reuters.

Energy Minister Ed Miliband said the fire had prevented the power back-up system from working and that engineers were working to deploy a third back-up mechanism, adding the government was working to understand "what, if any, lessons it has for our infrastructure".

Experts pointed to potential weakness in Heathrow's back-up plans. The shutdown comes less than a year after Heathrow told Britain's Civil Aviation Authority in a filing that it was "a leader in airfield resilience".

"(An) airport will have multiple electrical routes to feed it and to see them all wiped out is highly unusual," Tim Green, head of the department for electrical and electronic engineering at Imperial College London, told Sky News.

Tony Cox, an international risk management consultant, said: "I can't remember a piece of critical infrastructure being wholly shut down for at least a day because of a fire. I can't think of anything comparable."

The closure is set to have days-long knock-on effects globally, leaving airline passengers stranded as carriers reconfigure their networks to move planes and crews around.

CLEARING THE BACKLOG

Independent air transport consultant John Strickland said: "There will be impact running on several days because once aircraft are grounded somewhere away from an operation, they are stuck there with the crews operating the flights, and of course the customers, until those crews have been out to have the legally required rest periods."

This is not the first aviation sector outage in Britain that has raised concern across the industry.

An outage of Britain's air traffic control system NATS in 2023 cost over £100 million pounds (US$129 million), according to an independent review by Britain's Civil Aviation Authority, raising questions about the stability of the system.

The Heathrow outage, especially if it drags on past Friday, is likely to lead to extensive scrutiny.

"It is a clear planning failure by the airport," said Willie Walsh, the former head of British Airways and the director of trade group IATA.

Under EU and British rules, customers are entitled to up to €600 (US$649) from airlines for delays of three hours, or cancellations, as well as paid hotel stays and food, but only if the airline is at fault. In this case, the airlines are not at fault.

Most airlines are likely to offer the option of rerouting or a refund for a flight with some support for accommodation for those stranded by the shutdown.

While airlines are likely to offer these benefits in the interest of customer service, one can expect drawn out negotiations about who should fund the cost of the disruption and if others should repay airlines for fronting the bill.

"We must find a fairer allocation of passenger care costs than airlines alone picking up the tab when infrastructure fails," Walsh added in his statement.

The question of who picks up the bill is unclear, according to Strickland.

It will be a complex discussion between the airport, the airlines, the electricity providers and insurance companies, he said. "Of course, nobody will want to accept responsibility if it's possible not to."