Britain’s Heathrow Airport said it would be closed all of Friday after a huge fire at a nearby electrical substation wiped out power, disrupting flight schedules around the world.
The London Fire Brigade said around 70 firefighters were tackling the blaze in the west of London, which caused a mass power outage at Heathrow, Europe’s busiest and the world’s fifth-busiest airport.
Huge orange flames and plumes of black smoke could be seen shooting into the sky from a power station roughly three kilometres from the airport. It took firefighters about seven hours to get the blaze under control, the London Fire Brigade said. By early morning the roads around Britain’s biggest airport were largely deserted, except for some passengers walking away with their luggage.
“Our fire investigators will begin their investigation and we will continue working closely with our partners to minimize disruption and support the community,” the fire brigade said.
The fire, which was reported just after 11 p.m. local time on Thursday, forced planes to divert to airports across Britain and Europe, while many long-haul flights simply returned to their point of departure.
Cause of fire unclear
Heathrow said the airport, which was due to handle 1,351 flights during the day, flying up to 291,000 passengers, would stay closed until midnight as it was experiencing a significant power outage.
Heathrow normally opens for flights daily at 6 a.m. local time due to nighttime flying restrictions.
Some 120 flights were in the air when the closure was announced, with some turned around and others diverted to Gatwick Airport outside London, Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris or Ireland’s Shannon Airport, tracking services showed.
French airline Air France cancelled eight flights to and from Heathrow, while Dutch airline KLM said it cancelled three return flights.
British Airways itself had 341 flights scheduled to land at Heathrow on Friday.
“This will clearly have a significant impact on our operation and our customers, and we are working as quickly as possible to update them on their travel options for the next 24 hours and beyond,” it said.
The cause of the fire was not yet known.
Energy Minister Ed Miliband said the “catastrophic” fire had prevented the power back-up system from working and that engineers were working to deploy a third back-up mechanism.
“With any incident like this we will want to understand why it happened and what if any lessons it has for our infrastructure,” he told Sky News.
Flights diverted around the world
Industry experts said tourism, travel and trade would be further disrupted around the world, as flights will be cancelled or delayed due to aircraft being out of position.
“Heathrow is one of the major hubs of the world,” said Ian Petchenik, spokesman for flight tracking website FlightRadar24. “This is going to disrupt airlines’ operations around the world.”
The fire forced planes to divert around the world.
Travel experts said the disruption would extend far beyond Heathrow.
“Heathrow is one of the major hubs of the world,” said Ian Petchenik, spokesperson for FlightRadar24. “This is going to disrupt airlines’ operations around the world.”
Airlines’ carefully choreographed networks depend on airplanes and crews being in specific locations at specific times. Dozens of air carriers will have to hurriedly reconfigure their networks to move planes and crews around.
“The other question is, ‘What will airlines do to deal with the backlog of passengers?’,” said travel industry analyst Henry Harteveldt with Atmosphere Research Group. “It’s going to be a chaotic couple of days.”
Qantas Airways sent its flight from Perth to Paris, a United Airlines New York flight headed to Shannon, Ireland and a United Airlines flight from San Francisco was due to land in Washington, D.C. rather than London.
Some passengers turned to social media. Adrian Spender, who works at British retailer Tesco, said in a post on X that he was on an Airbus A380 that had been headed for Heathrow.
“#Heathrow no idea where we are going yet. Currently over Austria.”
Heathrow, and London’s other major airports, have been hit by outages in the past in recent years, most recently by an automated gate failure and an air traffic system meltdown, both in 2023.
Heathrow had its busiest January on record earlier this year, with more than 6.3 million passengers, up more than five per cent from the same period last year. January also was the 11th month in a row that it averaged over 200,000 passengers a day, with the airport citing trans-Atlantic travel as a key contributor.
