The closure of Britain’s Heathrow was set to affect the global aviation system for days and cost tens of millions of dollars, experts say, raising questions over why better contingency planning was not in place at the world’s fifth-largest airport.
Experts were stunned at the scale of the disruption – the largest since the Icelandic ash cloud of 2010 – as they tried to estimate the cost and breadth of the repercussions caused by a fire at a nearby electrical substation that knocked out the airport’s power supply and its backup power.
“It is a clear planning failure by the airport,” said Willie Walsh, head of global airlines body IATA, who, as former head of British Airways, has for years been a fierce critic of the crowded hub.
Heathrow is the busiest airport in Europe in terms of the aircraft capacity or total number of seats flying in and out each day, according to data firm OAG. All of Friday’s 1,332 scheduled flights were initially cancelled, the airport said earlier.
The blaze, which was reported just after 11pm on Thursday, forced planes to divert to airports across Britain and Europe, with many long-haul flights simply returning to their point of departure.
The shutdown comes less than a year after Heathrow told Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority in a filing that it was “a leader in airfield resilience”.
