Passengers to face more delays as Heathrow aims to return to normal operation
Europe’s busiest airport was shut for hours on Friday after an outage caused by an electricity substation fire.
Passengers will continue to face delays and cancellations as Heathrow aims to return to normal operation on Saturday after the airport was shut over a loss of power, with restrictions on overnight flights temporarily lifted.
Flights resumed at the west London airport on Friday evening following hours of closure after a blaze knocked out an electricity substation in Hayes late on Thursday evening.
The Metropolitan Police are not treating the incident as suspicious and the London Fire Brigade’s investigation is focusing on the electrical distribution equipment.
“(Passengers) should come to the airport as they normally would. There’s no reason to come earlier.”
But British Airways, which has a major presence at Heathrow, said it expects to operate around 85% of its scheduled flights at the airport on Saturday.
The airline would usually expect to run nearly 600 departures and arrivals on Saturday but it is understood cancellations will be made, where possible, to high-frequency routes.
A spokesman said: “We are planning to operate as many flights as possible to and from Heathrow on Saturday, but to recover an operation of our size after such a significant incident is extremely complex.
Restrictions on overnight flights were temporarily lifted to help ease congestion, the Department of Transport said.
According to Heathrow’s website, there is no formal ban on night flights but since the 1960s, the Government has placed restrictions on them.
There is an annual limit of 5,800 night-time take-offs and landings between the hours of 11.30pm and 6am as well as a nightly limit, which caps the amount of noise the airport can make at night.
Of the power outage, Mr 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%”.
After announcing early on Friday 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.
Following that announcement, several airlines said they would restart scheduled flights both to and from Heathrow, including British Airways, 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.
Around 200,000 passengers have been affected by the closure of what is Europe’s busiest airport.
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.
Heathrow is Europe’s largest airport, with more than 83.9 million passengers travelling through its terminals in 2024.
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, other airports accepted diverted flights originally destined for Heathrow, including London’s Gatwick Airport and Shannon Airport in Co Clare.
