London’s Heathrow Airport, a major global travel hub, was preparing for a full day of flight services on Saturday, following a devastating fire at an electrical substation that halted operations for nearly an entire day. The incident occurred in western London, leading to investigations by the Metropolitan Police, who have yet to find evidence of foul play.
British Airways, which handles the largest volume of flights at Heathrow, announced on Friday evening that it anticipated around 85 percent of its nearly 600 scheduled departures and arrivals to operate as planned on Saturday. However, passengers should expect extensive delays across all flights. To mitigate potential issues, the airline is canceling some flights on routes with higher frequencies, offering travelers more rebooking choices.
The disruption began early Friday morning, leading to a staggering number of over 1,000 diverted flights and affecting the travel plans of more than a quarter of a million people, as per data from Cirium, a leading aviation analytics firm. Flight arrivals resumed later in the evening, although a Heathrow representative warned that significant delays would persist in the following days as airlines worked to restore their regular schedules.
Passengers have been advised to avoid the airport until confirmed by their airlines, as operations are still stabilizing. Early Saturday morning, planes from various global destinations, including Hong Kong and South Africa, began arriving at the airport, indicating a slow return to normalcy.
Heathrow’s Chief Executive, Thomas Woldbye, noted that a backup transformer had functioned as expected when the substation lost power, but it was insufficient to maintain operations throughout the airport. The London Fire Brigade faced challenges in extinguishing the blaze due to the presence of thousands of gallons of cooling oil within the substation itself. National Grid officials have since worked to reconfigure the substation network, providing temporary power to the airport and other areas affected by the outage.
As flights and passenger services slowly resume, attention remains on the investigation into the cause of the fire and the broader implications for one of the world’s busiest airports.
