Heathrow Airport faced massive cancellations and delays early Friday morning after a fire at the North Hyde substation in west London. A fire that powered Heathrow Airport led to its closure. That one incident led to thousands of flights being cancelled, stranding tens of thousands of passengers around the globe. Heathrow Airport said Saturday morning that the airport was “open and fully operational.” The disruption’s impacts continue to pulse through air travel itineraries.
The airport was forced to reroute about 1,400 tentative flights due to the mishap, which included almost 120 flights landing at different destinations. Flight tracking website flightradar24.com helped visualize the extent of the damage. With the arrival of Saturday, things started to look up. Today, more than 30 flights were still cancelled and over 15 still delayed as per Heathrow’s live departure board. In order to provide space for disrupted travelers, 50 more slots than normal were opened up on Saturday’s schedule, allowing for 10,000 more travelers.
As Denmark’s Thomas Woldbye, Heathrow’s former CEO, warned in the aftermath of such a crisis, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/25/recovery-damaging-incident-airport-delays.html recovery is not short-term.
"It takes time to switch to the two remaining substations," he told the BBC.
Heathrow is currently dependent upon three electricity substations, each of which contains a backup electricity subsystem. The central protection in this occurrence was the two risk-free substations. Woldbye stressed that the issue had started well outside of Heathrow’s control.
"Not created at Heathrow Airport, it was created outside the airport and we had to deal with the consequences," he said.
The unprecedented disruption to service affected travelers around the world. Ann Palmer and her husband were trapped in Toronto, Canada, trying to get home to Aberdeen, Scotland. Their continuing flight from Heathrow to Edinburgh was moved to Monday. Palmer was given accommodation and meal vouchers by British Airways. He told the TNO it was a lousy experience because of the lack of communication regarding his flight from Toronto to Heathrow.
For Heathrow, an ambitious attempt to control the damage included working closely with airline partners and focusing on customer service to support passengers stranded by cancellation cascades and blocks. The airport’s main priority wasn’t just getting things back to normal, it was without compromising safety and customer service. For their part, Woldbye promised that Heathrow would work in full good faith with regulatory authorities and incident investigators.
"We will support every effort to understand the causes and impacts of yesterday's off-airport incident," he stated.