Flights resuming at Heathrow; apology to passengers from airport boss

Flights will resume at Heathrow Airport on Friday evening (21 March) as its chief executive apologised to stranded passengers and defended the response to an "unprecedented" loss of power caused by a substation fire.

Thomas Woldbye described the blaze which knocked out an electricity substation in Hayes in the early hours of Friday as "as big as it gets for our airport" and that "we cannot guard ourselves 100%".

He also said that a back-up transformer failed and power supplies had to be restructured to restore electricity enough to power what is described as a "mid-sized city".

The west London airport initially announced it would be closed until 11.59pm but later said repatriation flights and a handful of British Airways long-haul flights would resume Friday evening.

It is expected to run a full schedule on Saturday.

Around 200,000 passengers have been affected by the closure of what is Europe's busiest airport.

Mr Woldbye said: "I'd like to stress that this has been an incident of major severity. It's not a small fire.

"We have lost power equal to that of a mid-sized city and our backup systems have been working as they should but they are not sized to run the entire airport."

Asked if there is a weak point in Heathrow's power system, he said: "You can say that but of course contingencies of certain sizes we cannot guard ourselves against 100% and this is one of them.

"This has been a major incident. I mean, short of anybody getting hurt, this is as big as it gets for our airport and we are actually coming back quite fast I would say, when you consider the amount of systems that we have to shut down then bring back up and make sure that they're safe."

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