Flights to Britain's Heathrow Airport began resuming late on Friday
after a fire at a nearby electrical substation knocked out
its power, shutting Europe's busiest airport. The closure
caused travel turmoil worldwide. Heathrow said its teams had
worked tirelessly to reopen and that there would be a
limited number of flights on Friday, mostly focused on
relocating aircraft and bringing planes into London. CEO Thomas
Woolby. Called the incident unprecedented. Contingencies of certain
sizes we cannot guard ourselves against 100%. I hope
people appreciate that we do not close down the airport
unless we have severe safety concerns. That's why we
do it and that's what has happened today. Police
said that after an initial assessment they were not treating
the incident as suspicious, although inquiries remained ongoing.
The airport had been due to handle more than 1300
flights, flying up to 291,000 passengers. Planes were
instead diverted to other airports in Britain and across Europe
, while many long haul flights returned to their point
of departure. Among those waiting to return to London
was Jane Davis, a teacher supervising students on a
school trip to Dubai. It's bad enough if you
with your family, but when you're responsible for 8
children, um, and you just, who are
ready, who have had an amazing week but are
just ready to be home. Yeah, you know
, you've got a heavy day in front of you
. Airline executives, electrical engineers, and passengers questioned
how Britain's gateway to the world could be forced to
close by one fire, however large. Heathrow said
it had diesel generators and unintractable power supplies in place
to land. Aircraft and evacuate passengers safely and that
those systems all operated as expected. Britain's Transport Minister
Heidi Alexander said those backups, however, were not
designed to power the entire airport. It's important to
remember that large airports such as Heathrow. Take up
about as much energy as a small city, and
so I've spoken to the chief executive of Heathrow about
what has happened and any lessons that might be learned
for the future. The airline industry is now facing
the prospect of a financial hit costing tens of millions
. and a likely fight over who should pay.
Airline experts said the last time European airports experienced disruption
on such a large scale was back in 2010 when
an Icelandic volcanic ash cloud grounded some 100,000 flights.