Major airports must review resilience plans after 'unprecedented' Heathrow closure due to fire

Major UK airports, including those in Scotland, have been urged to urgently review their resilience plans as the boss of London Heathrow defended shutting Europe’s busiest flight hub in an emergency incident that caused widespread travel chaos.

Flights started to resume at Heathrow Airport on Friday evening as chief executive Thomas Woldbye apologised to hundreds of thousands of stranded passengers for the response to an “unprecedented” loss of power caused by a substation fire.

A fire rages at the Hayes electricity substation near Heathrow (Picture: London Fire Brigade) | PA

Around 291,000 passengers were affected by the closure, as more than 1,300 flights to and from Heathrow were either cancelled or diverted. These included those travelling to or from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness airports.

A total of 100 inbound flights to Heathrow were diverted to other international airports. And British Airways warned its services would remain severely impacted for days to come, as the airline’s chief executive Sean Doyle described the situation as “unprecedented”.

Counter-terrorism officers from the Metropolitan Police are leading the investigation into the cause of a fire that knocked out power to the airport. The force said there was “no indication of foul play”, but stressed “we retain an open mind at this time”.

Mr Woldbye described the blaze that knocked out an electricity substation in Hayes in the early hours of Friday as “as big as it gets for our airport” and that “we cannot guard ourselves 100 per cent”.

He said a back-up transformer failed and power supplies had to be restructured to restore electricity enough to power what is described as a “mid-sized city”.

Norman Shanks, a visiting professor in aviation security at Coventry University, told The Scotsman the tense geopolitical situation meant it was vital the Met’s counter-terrorism officers spearheaded the investigation.

Prof Shanks, who previously worked as airport security manager at Heathrow where he was responsible for developing its security policies, and operational and training procedures, said major airports would be best placed revising their resilience plans in light of the incident, particularly around susceptibility to their power supplies.

“The involvement of the counter terrorism team is an obvious and essential requirement to determine if there was any terrorist element involved,” he said. “This is to be expected given the volatility of the world today.

“As for the future, Heathrow and every other major airport needs to revise and if necessary update resilience plans. In many cases, this may require establishing multiple sources of power supply to ensure that there is not a single point of failure or susceptibility in the event of any future incident. These facilities need to be adequately protected from illegal interference whether at an airport or as in this case, an off airport facility shared with domestic supplies.”

UK energy secretary Ed Miliband said the mass closure had made Heathrow look “vulnerable”. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander added there would be lessons to learn from the incident.

Ms Alexander acknowledged the “immense distress and disruption” caused by the closure, but added: “They [the airport] have stood up their resilience plan swiftly, and they’ve collaborated closely with our emergency responders and the airline operators. They do have back-up energy supplies, they have generators, diesel generators.

“None of that failed on this occasion because that back-up supply is designed to protect the critical key systems within the airport and not to provide power to the whole airport.”

Aviation consultant John Strickland said the closure of Heathrow for an entire day is “a massive dislocation to have to recover from”.

He said: “We’re talking about several days’ worth of disruption to get the planes recovered and start using them again to move planned and disrupted passengers.” Mr Strickland likened the disruption to what happened after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, when flights were grounded across the US, saying: “It’s a contained version of 9/11.”

The west London airport initially announced it would be closed until 11.59pm, but later said repatriation flights and a handful of British Airways long-haul flights would resume on Friday evening. It is expected to run a full schedule on Saturday.

Mr Woldbye said: “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 back-up 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 per cent 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.”

National Grid said it had found an “interim solution” to allow power to be restored to the airport. A spokesperson said: “Working in partnership with the local network operator SSEN Distribution, the network has been reconfigured to restore all customers impacted, including the ability to resupply the parts of Heathrow Airport that are connected to North Hyde.

“This is an interim solution while we carry out further work at North Hyde to return the substation and our network to normal operation.”

In Scotland, Edinburgh Airport confirmed ten flights - all British Airways - to Heathrow and 12 from Heathrow were affected on Friday. The flights carry about 2,800 passengers a day among 37,000 daily passengers at Edinburgh - about 8 per cent of the airport’s total traffic.

British Airways services from Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness to Heathrow were also affected.

The Scottish Passenger Agents’ Association (SPAA) had earlier advised all travellers due to fly via Heathrow to check with their airline or travel agent.

An SPAA spokesperson said on Friday: “Heathrow is a vital connection point for travellers from Scotland heading to destinations around the world. Today’s closure is causing severe disruption and the situation is changing rapidly. Travellers with connecting flights – particularly those heading long haul – should not assume that their journey will go ahead as planned.”

Cirium, the aviation analytics firm, said while Heathrow Airport was reopening on Friday night, effects would ripple across the weekend.

Rory Boland, editor of Which? Travel, said: "Over the weekend thousands of people will find themselves stuck and anxiously facing a clamber for seats on the next available flight. While the law requires airlines to reroute passengers to their destination at the earliest opportunity, including with other carriers when necessary, we know that some airlines refuse to do so.

"If passengers are being told by their airline to wait days for the next available flight, and have exhausted efforts to get them to rebook them on earlier departures with an alternate airline then they are within their rights to make that booking themselves and claim the money back.”

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.