London’s Heathrow Airport resumed operations on Saturday, ordering a probe into how it dealt with a power outage that shut Europe’s busiest air hub for almost a day, while the government issued a separate investigation amid airline warnings of further delays and cancellations.
British Airways, whose main hub is Heathrow, said it had operated around 90% of its schedule on Saturday and promised a “near-full” schedule for Sunday after chief executive Sean Doyle warned on Friday the “huge impact” would last days.
The world’s fifth-busiest airport had been due to handle 1,351 flights on Friday, flying up to 291,000 passengers. But the fire at a nearby electrical substation forced planes to be diverted to other airports and many long-haul flights returned to their point of departure.
Britain’s Energy Ministry said on Saturday it had commissioned the National Energy System Operator to carry out an urgent investigation into the outage that raised questions about the resilience of the country’s critical infrastructure.
Heathrow said it had tasked an independent board member, former transport minister Ruth Kelly, with undertaking a review of the airport’s crisis-management plan and its response to the incident to boost resilience.
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.
“It has been absolutely insane,” said Amber Roden, a U.S. citizen getting married in three days’ time after a number of her relatives had their flights canceled.
She said two relatives who were halfway to London from Atlanta had to turn around and go back. Two others will not make it to the U.K. until the day of the wedding, which she has been planning for two years.
The vast majority of scheduled morning and early afternoon flights departed successfully on Saturday, with a handful of delays and cancellations, Heathrow’s departures website showed.
“We don’t expect any major amount of flights to be canceled or delayed,” Heathrow chief executive Thomas Woldbye told BBC radio.
The airport has hundreds of additional staff on hand to facilitate an extra 10,000 passengers traveling through the airport, a spokesperson said in a statement.
But, airlines were still left dealing with disrupted schedules and the tens of thousands of passengers whose journeys had been interrupted.
Virgin Atlantic said on Saturday that it planned to run a near-full schedule with limited cancellations. Air India said it had restarted flights to and from Heathrow and expected to operate “as scheduled.”
Fire not ‘suspicious’
Several passengers traveling to Heathrow from London’s Paddington Station were still nervous.
“I’m just hoping that when I get there, I can go,” said university professor Melissa Graboyes, who said she was repeatedly checking the status of her flight to Toronto.
Police said that after an initial assessment, they were not treating the incident as “suspicious,” although inquiries remained ongoing. London Fire Brigade said its investigations would focus on the electrical distribution equipment.
The travel 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 International Air Transport Association (IATA), who, as former head of British Airways, has for years been a fierce critic of the crowded hub.
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.
“Britain humiliated by airport fiasco,” read a headline in the Sun newspaper. “Farcical,” wrote the Daily Mail.
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