Ministers have ordered an urgent probe into the substation fire which forced Heathrow airport to close for 15 hours on Friday – as experts warned the remarkable meltdown had “embarrassed” Britain on the global stage.
The travel plans of up to 300,000 passengers were cast into disarray on Friday after the blaze at a single west London substation grounded more than 1,300 flights between Europe’s busiest airport and locations across the globe.
While the airport declared itself “fully operational” once again on Saturday – with hundreds of extra airport staff rallied to facilitate an additional 10,000 passengers travelling through Heathrow – more than 100 flights were cancelled, including those travelling to New York and arriving from Dubai. Heathrow would typically expect to facilitate 600 flights on Saturday.
After counter-terror officers were initially called in to lead the investigation into the fire, police confirmed on Saturday that the blaze was believed to be non-suspicious and said the London Fire Brigade would instead lead a probe focusing on electrical distribution equipment.
Criticism of the situation has since intensified, with Labour MP Toby Harris – who leads the National Preparedness Commission, which campaigns to improve resilience – saying: “It’s a huge embarrassment for the country that a fire in one electricity substation can have such a devastating effect.”
And Jason Bona, owner of supply chain firm PS Forwarding, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the incident made Heathrow a “laughing stock” in the global freight community.
“It is a clear planning failure by the airport,” said Willie Walsh, a former British Airways chief who now leads the global airline body IATA and has long been a fierce critic of Heathrow.
Vowing that the government “is determined to do everything it can to prevent a repeat of what happened at Heathrow”, energy secretary Ed Miliband said on Saturday evening he had ordered the grid operator to “urgently investigate” the outage.
In conjunction with regulator Ofsted, Mr Miliband told the National Energy System Operator (Neso) to carry out the independent probe “to properly understand what happened and what lessons need to be learned” regarding “energy resilience for critical national infrastructure, both now and in the future”.
Neso is expected to report to Ofgem and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero with its initial findings within six weeks.
Welcoming the investigation, Heathrow’s chief executive Thomas Woldbye vowed to “support every effort to understand the causes and impacts” of the fire and said his staff were “committed to working closely with all stakeholders to ensure a thorough investigation to help strengthen the airport’s future resilience”.
Heathrow chair Lord Paul Deighton further confirmed on Saturday evening that former transport secretary Ruth Kelly, who is an independent member of the airport’s board, will undertake a review of the airport’s crisis management plans.
The London Fire Brigade warned its own investigation to establish the exact cause of the fire at the Hayes high-voltage substation could take weeks.
Deputy commissioner Jonathan Smith said: “The fire involved a transformer comprising 25,000 litres of its cooling oil fully alight. This created a major hazard owing to the still live high voltage equipment and the nature of an oil-fuelled fire.”
After the fire in Hayes knocked out both the substation and its backup, Heathrow was left with only two remaining grid supply points to fall back upon.
While these two supply points are capable of powering the airport, Mr Woldbye said this was only after a complex process which involved reallocating supplies and resetting systems across the airport – which took most of Friday to complete.
Firefighters will maintain a small presence at Hayes for the coming days to ensure any remaining hotspots within the electrical equipment are fully extinguished.
Transport secretary Heidi Alexander said: “Heathrow is a massive airport that uses the energy of a small city, so it’s imperative we identify how this power failure happened and learn from this to ensure a vital piece of national infrastructure remains strong.
“Whilst Heathrow is back to business, some disruption is expected over coming days as things get back to normal so I encourage anyone travelling to check with their airlines and plan their journeys.”
In a double blow for travellers, that disruption will also extend to rail travel to and from the airport – with the Heathrow Express announcing it will also be out of action for upgrade work on Sunday morning.
A Heathrow Express spokesperson said: “A gentle reminder: Due to planned railway upgrade work, Heathrow Express will be running a reduced service on Sunday, 23 March, with no service before 9.12am.”
With British Airways – its main hub is Heathrow – saying it expected around 85 per cent of its schedule to proceed on Saturday, chief executive Sean Doyle warned of a “huge impact on all of our customers flying with us over the coming days”.
However, Virgin Atlantic said it was planning to run a near-full schedule on Saturday with limited cancellations. Air India said it had restarted flights to and from Heathrow and expected to operate “as per schedule”.
As some passengers described “nightmarish” bids to reach their intended destinations on Saturday, others praised Heathrow and their airlines’ handling of the situation.
Holidaymaker Tim Kolb, who travelled from Dallas, Texas, said: “I thought I was going to be there delayed two days, but I went over yesterday. It was organised well, in fact, they had several planes leaving within an hour of each other to Heathrow.”
Mr Woldbye apologised to stranded passengers and defended the airport’s response to the situation, saying the incident is as “as big as it gets for our airport” and that “we cannot guard ourselves 100 per cent”.
Aviation experts said the last time European airports had experienced disruption on such a large scale was the 2010 Icelandic volcanic ash cloud that grounded some 100,000 flights.
Heathrow and London’s other major airports have also been hit by other major outages in recent years, most recently by an automated gate failure and an air traffic system meltdown, both in 2023.
With the travel industry facing the prospect of a financial hit costing tens of millions of pounds and a likely fight over who should pay, Mr Woldbye was asked on Friday who would pay for the disruption. Responding there were “procedures in place”, he said: “We don’t have liabilities in place for incidents like this.”
