Aviation travelers face the bottom of disruption when Heathrow tries to recover from a fire that closed the busiest airport in Europe, leading to 1300 flight abolitions and raising questions about British infrastructure resistance.
The sheet on the local electrical wiring caused a power failure that closed the airport on Friday morning in the early morning hours and forced incoming flights to divert to other nodes such as Paris and Amsterdam, or return to the original airport.
Some transatlantic flights ended wherever space was available, including the flight Air Canada from Toronto diverted to Goose Bay, Newfoundland.
At its height of 70 firefighters, it was engaged in a bump, which began shortly before midnight on Thursday and lit 25,000 liters of cooling oil.
After the engineers worked to restore the power supply throughout the day, Heathrow said that a handful of flights would run on Friday evening before reopening on Saturday.
The flight service continued just after 19:00, when the first aircraft landed back in Heathrow.
However, it is expected that disruption will take days when carriers have launched a logistics challenge to restart their operations with aircraft, crews and passengers outside the place and scattered around the world.
“These are unprecedented situations and we haven't seen the closure of Heathrow for many years,” said Sean Doyle, British Airways CEO.
The London Metropolitan Police said his order to fight terrorism is the leading questions, given “the location of the substation and the impact that had this incident on the critical national infrastructure”.
On Friday evening, Met added that while the responsibility remained in the hands of the anti -terrorist police, they had been suspected with the incident so far.
“The investigation of the cause of the fire remains in the early stages,” the power said. “After the initial assessment, we do not consider this incident to be suspicious, although the questions are still continuing.”
Closing after the failure of one local substation also raised questions about the resistance of Heathrow and whether other parts of the British national infrastructure were similarly vulnerable.
Willie Walsh, former boss of BA and current head of the International Air Transport Association, criticized what he said was a “clear failure failure” that left a critical infrastructure dependent on a single source of energy.
Ruth Cadbury, chairwoman of the Transport Committee, said the BBC that the incident “raises questions about infrastructure resistance”.
Heathrow's management refused these claims. They said that the airport was drawn energy from three wiring and backup generators that offer enough emergency energy to maintain open runways, although it is not enough to control the full operation of the airport for a longer period of time.
Thomas Woldby, CEO Heathrow, said the airport suffered a “incident of great seriousness”. He added, “This is unprecedented. It has never happened before. … We don't close the airport unless we have serious security concerns.”
While only one of the three distributions supplying power failed, Heathrow was forced to close thousands of electrical systems. “Restarting all these systems in a safe way … It takes a long time,” Woldbye said. “We can't protect ourselves 100 %.” [against every contingency]”He said.
British Airways, which operates more than half of the Heathrow flights, was by far the worst affected airline, and told passengers to prepare for long -term disturbances.
“This incident will have a significant impact on our airline and customers for many days, disrupting the paths expected in the coming days,” Doyle said.
The airline planned to operate more than 670 flights that carry around 107,000 customers on Friday, while planning similar figures on the weekend. More than 200,000 passengers use Heathrow every day.
Complete closing was sent by passengers who tried to find other ways of traveling. Some airlines, including Ryanair and EasyJet, as well as the international EUROSTAR train services, gave their services other seats, while railway operators in the UK reported tips in train reservations.
Some turned to private nozzles. Toby Edwards, a collaborator of a private jet charter company Victor, said that demand for years “sharply” sharply, including one passenger who paid $ 75,000 to fly through the Atlantic.
Since the demand was rising to the hotels of the rooms near Heathrow, they were accused of raising prices more than four times to up to 700 GBP per night.
The European Airlines shares were closed on Friday after the closure of Heathrow, including the International Airlines Group, the parents of the British Airways, who dropped almost 3 %.
Other reports Lucy Fisher, Kieran Smith, Akila Quinio and Jamie John
