Heathrow Airport flights resume as boss apologises
Thomas Woldbye said the blaze which knocked out an electricity substation in Hayes in the early hours of Friday was ‘as big as it gets’.
Flights have resumed at Heathrow Airport as its chief executive apologised to stranded passengers and defended the response to an “unprecedented” loss of power caused by a substation fire.
Thomas Woldbye described the blaze which knocked out an electricity substation in Hayes late on Thursday evening as “as big as it gets for our airport” and that “we cannot guard ourselves 100%”.
The Metropolitan Police said they are not treating the incident as suspicious while the London Fire Brigade (LFB) announced its investigation will now focus on the electrical distribution equipment.
Meanwhile Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said there would be lessons to learn from the incident.
The west London airport initially announced it would be closed until 11.59pm but later said repatriation flights for passengers diverted to other airports in Europe would resume Friday evening.
Several airlines announced they would restart scheduled flights both to and from Heathrow, including British Airways (BA), Air Canada and United Airlines.
A BA flight to Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia, took off just before 9pm after a slight delay to its expected departure time.
Restrictions on overnight flights have also been temporarily lifted to help ease congestion, the Department of Transport said.
Mr Woldbye said the airport expects to return to “100% operation” on Saturday but BA said it is expecting around 85% of its Saturday Heathrow schedule to run.
He told reporters: “I’d like to stress that this has been an incident of major severity. It’s not a small fire.
“We have lost power equal to that of a mid-sized city and our backup systems have been working as they should but they are not sized to run the entire airport.”
Asked if there is a weak point in Heathrow’s power system, he said: “You can say that but of course contingencies of certain sizes we cannot guard ourselves against 100% and this is one of them.
“This has been a major incident. I mean, short of anybody getting hurt, this is as big as it gets for our airport and we are actually coming back quite fast I would say, when you consider the amount of systems that we have to shut down then bring back up and make sure that they’re safe.”
The CEO said Heathrow will “look at anything we can learn from this” and encouraged the Prime Minister to ask him any questions he has.
Willie Walsh, the International Air Transport Association’s director general, criticised Heathrow in the wake of the disruption.
“This is yet another case of Heathrow letting down both travellers and airlines,” he said.
“From that arises the question of who bears the costs of taking care of disrupted travellers.
“We must find a fairer allocation of passenger care costs than airlines alone picking up the tab when infrastructure fails. Until that happens, Heathrow has very little incentive to improve.”
She said: “They have stood up their resilience plan swiftly, and they’ve collaborated closely with our emergency responders and the airline operators, they do have backup energy supplies, they have generators, diesel generators.
“None of that failed on this occasion because that backup supply is designed to protect the critical key systems within the airport and not to provide power to the whole airport.”
The Transport Secretary 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”.
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.
“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.
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.
In April of that year, air travel was grounded across Europe because of an ash cloud caused by an Icelandic volcanic eruption.
On Friday, Gatwick Airport accepted seven diverted flights from locations including Singapore, Johannesburg, Lagos, Cape Town and Doha which were originally destined for Heathrow.
Shannon Airport in Co Clare accepted six diversions from Toronto, Atlanta, Bridgetown Barbados, Boston, Orlando and Newark.
Rory Boland, editor of magazine Which? Travel, said affected passengers are not entitled to compensation but airlines should provide assistance such as overnight accommodation if required and re-routing bookings, including with rival carriers from alternative airports.
LFB deputy commissioner Jonathan Smith said: “The fire involved a transformer comprising of 25,000 litres of cooling oil fully alight.
“This created a major hazard due to the still live high-voltage equipment and the nature of the oil-fuelled fire.”
A local resident, who did not want to be named, said she heard a “massive explosion” before all the power went off, adding: “It just smelled like burning.”
There were no casualties at the scene of the fire, according to the London Ambulance Service.
Footage posted to social media showed huge flames and large plumes of smoke coming from the facility.
