Heathrow Airport in London shut down after a nearby fire that cut off power supply. The entire airport was shut down for around 18 hours on Friday, March 21st. The fire was determined to be spontaneous and not intentionally started. Despite the rarity of the situation, many are criticizing the airport for an airport the size that it is, not being better prepared.
Britain’s national grid says that the airport had enough energy to stay open as they have multiple power substations and only one was down. Though there are other energy options, it took around 18 hours for the airport to resume as scheduled and for a company as large as Heathrow to be dependent on one energy source, many have labeled the incident as poor planning. Many airlines complained that this shutdown was unnecessary as all they should have had to do was to switch to another substation. Heathrow, however, argues that when an outage this size happens, all planes need to be grounded so they can have a controlled and safe shutdown for the power transfer to happen. The size of the airport was another struggle that needed to be accounted for when recovering from an outage. Many different systems needed to be rebooted and tested which may be dangerous if rushed.
The incident is expected to cost airlines millions of dollars to make up for the countless flights missed as it’s an expectation that they provide compensation of some sort for the inconvenience. This may come in the form of housing, meals, alternative travel, or a refund. Along with this, it throws flights off schedule as many people still need to travel. Results of this include air traffic and delays in all air travel. Flights that needed rerouting added to this cost as additional fuel and airport fees were required.
This doesn’t only affect flights leaving from Heathrow; it also affects those coming in, resulting in flight buildup around the world. It is Europe’s largest airport so the effect was much larger than normal, with about 1,300 impacted flights and 250,000 passengers affected. Heathrow was reported to have bad communication relating to flight status as terminals were reopening. All of the issues reported resulted in an investigation conducted at the airport on, more specifically, what took so long to open things up. While acknowledging their disruptions, the airport claims, “lessons can and will be learned,” raising the expectations for future incidents.
