Heathrow airport live: Passengers to face ‘huge’ impact into the weekend as airport aims to resume ‘full operation’

Phillip Kizun had to devise a new route yesterday after his flight from London to Dublin was cancelled due to a power outage at Heathrow Airport.

Mr Kizun, 58, took a train to Wales and boarded a ferry from Holyhead to reach the Irish capital, meeting several European and American travellers making similar last-minute changes.

“It was an absolute real ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles,’” he told The New York Times, referencing the 1987 Steve Martin-John Candy comedy, shortly after arriving in Dublin for work.

The outage, caused by a fire at an energy substation near Heathrow, forced the airport to shut down for much of the day, leaving thousands of passengers stranded.

Some Heathrow-bound flights were forced to turn back midair, while others never departed, causing widespread confusion and frustration.

While some travellers, like Mr Kizun, managed to find alternative routes, others were left in limbo or abandoned their journeys altogether.

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 ($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.

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.

Meanwhile, Heathrow Chief Executive Thomas Woldbye said he expected the airport to be back “in full operation” today.

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”.

A fire that shut down Heathrow airport due to a major power outage will cost the UK economy millions of pounds – even as flights resume on Friday night.

Some 1,351 flights were either cancelled or forced to land elsewhere, affecting thousands of tourists and many businesses, even beyond the airlines who suffered the first impact on Friday morning.

While putting a precise figure on the impact of such an unexpected occurrence is difficult, the usual flow of inbound passengers to the airport provide scope for at least some guidance of the damage which might be done, as Oxford Economics told The Independent.

“In terms of what’s at stake, at the conservative end, we estimate a potential loss of tourism revenue amounting to £4.8 million per day,” economist Stephen Rooney said.

“We can estimate this loss based on typical inbound arrivals volumes that come to the UK through Heathrow and the average daily spend of those travelling.”

Karl Matchett with the full report:

Alex Udenba missed a day of his holiday to see family and friends in Nigeria because his flight was cancelled.

Mr Udenba, a retail worker in London, has not gone to the country in three years and was hoping to spend a month there.

The 41-year-old has been in the airport since 1am on Friday, and will be there until his new flight at 7.30am on Saturday.

He said: “Heathrow Airport, a world-class airport, doesn’t have a place for people to sit down when things like this happen. It is very shameful. It’s not anyone’s fault this happened, but at least we should be looked after.”

The global aviation industry was scrambling on Saturday to reroute passengers and fix battered airline schedules after a huge fire at an electrical substation serving London’s Heathrow Airport forced closure of Europe’s busiest air hub.

Some flights 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.

The 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.

Senior reporter Alex Ross investigates:

Hotels have been accused of profiteering with rooms near Heathrow Airport costing £650 on Friday as hundreds of passengers have been left stranded by the closure of the grounding of all flights.

Louis, a video producer who was due to fly to Dublin, accused nearby hotels of increasing their prices, with major chains charging more than £500 for accommodation on Friday night.

The 28-year-old, who only provided his first name, was forced to search for a new hotel in case Saturday’s rescheduled flight was cancelled again.

“They’ve actually doubled, if not, in some cases, tripled the prices of the rooms based on what’s going on, which is absolutely absurd. They’re profiting off of people’s misfortunes in this. I don’t know how that’s allowed,” he said.

A search showed the cheapest room at Best Western London Heathrow Ariel Hotel was a executive double room priced at £650 for one night on Friday – the same room is £72.25 next week, 28 March.

At Holiday Inn London – Heathrow Bath Road, the cheapest rooms – a queen standard, single standard and standard – were all priced at £541 on Friday. A week later, the rooms cost £87. The chain’s Holiday Inn Express London Heathrow T4 is sold out. Read more here.

Around 200,000 passengers have been affected by the closure of Europe’s busiest airport.

This is believed to be the worst disruption at Heathrow since December 2010, when thousands of Christmas getaway passengers camped in the terminals because of widespread cancellations caused by snow.

Transport secretary Heidi Alexander said she was in close contact with the energy secretary, the home secretary and with Heathrow to “make sure that any lessons we need to learn from the systems that the airport has in place are learned”.

London Fire Brigade (LFB) received the first reports of the fire at 11.23pm on Thursday, forcing the closure of the airport.

Some 120 aircraft heading to the airport at that time were forced to either divert or return to their point of origin, measures which saw passengers on board Qantas flights to Heathrow from Singapore and Perth diverted to Paris before taking buses to London.

Counter-terrorism officers from the Metropolitan Police have been leading the investigation into the cause of the fire, which did not result in any casualties at the scene.

“After initial assessment, we are not treating this incident as suspicious, although inquiries do remain ongoing,” Commander Simon Messinger said.

Thousands of homes were left without power and more than 100 people were evacuated after a transformer within the substation caught fire.

After Heathrow Airport was shut over loss of power, Airport’s chief executive Thomas Woldbye said a back-up transformer failed, meaning systems had to be closed down in accordance with safety procedures so that power supplies could be restructured from two remaining substations to restore enough electricity to power what is described as a “mid-sized city”.

He apologised to stranded passengers and defended the airport’s response to the situation, saying the incident is as “as big as it gets for our airport” and that “we cannot guard ourselves 100 per cent”.

After announcing early yesterday that it would be closed until 11.59pm, Heathrow later reopened with a focus on repatriation flights for passengers diverted to other airports in Europe.