London CNN —
Heathrow’s chief executive has defended the airport’s response to the power outage and shutdown that sparked global travel chaos, apologizing to stranded passengers but calling the incident “unprecedented.”
Heathrow, one of the world’s busiest airports, was brought to a complete standstill Friday by a huge fire in an electrical substation in a nearby London suburb, plunging the airport and thousands of homes into darkness.
The shutdown could affect around 150,000 passengers and inflict hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damages on the aviation industry, raising questions about Heathrow’s reliance on a single power source. The government says the national energy operator will investigate.
But Thomas Woldbye, Heathrow’s chief executive, said he was “proud” of the airport’s response to the “unprecedented” crisis and claimed it is not unusual for airports to be so dependent on a sole source of energy.
With hundreds of planes headed for Heathrow when the substation failed, Woldbye said the airport’s backup power system was “up and running” immediately.
“All our backup systems were up and running. Our tower was running. Our runways were running as they should,” Woldbye told BBC Radio 4. “Whereas the safety systems are working and we can get aircraft in and out, most of the airport infrastructure comes to a standstill when we need to reset as we did yesterday.”
Woldbye claimed this is “how most airports operate,” stressing that the substation is part of the electricity company’s infrastructure – not Heathrow’s – and that the airport had to handle “the consequences of that failure.”
“Heathrow uses as much energy as a city every single day, so we don’t have backup power for package systems, fuel systems, things like air bridges and so on,” Woldbye said.
“I don’t know of an airport who has that,” he added. “That would require a separate power plant of a big size to (be on) standby all the time.”
Woldbye said Heathrow was “sincerely sorry” for the disruptions faced by passengers. Although the airport is now “operating as normal,” he said it would take time for airlines to clear their backlogs.
Airlines have warned of delays for days to come, with aircraft and cabin crew having been diverted to different airports, posing deployment problems.
Yousef Alderees, a 19-year-old student, was supposed to fly back home from London to Kuwait when the airport was shut down on Friday.
“It was a mess,” he told Reuters, describing how he got to London’s Paddington train station to head to Heathrow before being told that all trains to the airport were cancelled.
“We couldn’t find another hotel booking because all the hotels were fully booked. So it was a disaster,” Alderees said.
British utility company National Grid said Saturday morning that power had been restored to “all customers connected to” the affected substation. More than 16,000 homes lost power after the fire in the London suburb of Hayes, and some 150 people were evacuated.
London’s counterterrorism police are investigating how the blaze broke out. Britain’s energy secretary Ed Miliband said there was “no suggestion of foul play,” although police have since said they are keeping an “open mind” over the cause.
On Saturday afternoon, Miliband announced in a post on X that Britain’s National Energy System Operator (NESO) will be conducting an investigation into the incident.
The investigation will also help “to understand any wider lessons to be learned on energy resilience for critical national infrastructure, both now and in the future,” he said.
Heathrow was the world’s fourth-busiest airport in 2023, hosting a quarter of a million passengers each day. Last year, a record-breaking 83.9 million passengers passed through.
Earlier this year, the UK government backed plans to expand Heathrow Airport by building a third runway after years of heated debate. While the airport is a key source of growth for the British economy, environmentalists and local activists have long opposed the disruption this would cause to the surrounding area. A third runway could increase the number of flights from its current cap of 480,000 a year to 720,000.
Asked about the third runway and whether passengers can “trust” Heathrow, Woldbye said he has “full trust in the fact that we can build a third runway that is resilient,” and denied that the airport has been “complacent” about its preparedness for major incidents like Friday’s.