Each of the quarter-million passengers whose travel plans were wrecked by the sudden closure of Heathrow airport on Friday simply wanted to reach the destination on their ticket. There was no good way to learn that wasn’t going to happen due to a fire in an electricity substation that had cut power to Europe’s busiest airport.
For the 30,000 bleary passengers or so aboard overnight flights to west of central London, it was an announcement from the pilot saying the plane was diverting to some corner of a foreign airfield: possibly Reykjavik, maybe Cairo. Even worse, perhaps: that after four hours of flying towards London, a swift U-turn as the aircraft returned to its starting point, whether in Delhi or New York. Back to square one.
Another 100,000 never made it beyond square one. These were the people who were booked on flights from Heathrow. Many had begun their journey to the airport in the small hours of Friday, only to receive the brutal message: “We’re really sorry that your upcoming flight on Friday 21 March 2025 has been cancelled.” Joy and excitement crushed in an instant.
An equal and opposite number of travellers constituted a foreign legion, scattered across airports around the world. Some were returning home from holidays or busiest trips; others were overseas visitors to the UK. Perhaps a few were happy; had I been a British Airways passenger from Singapore, and rebooked three days later, I might have enjoyed the airline’s obligation to provide a hotel room and meals for an extended stay. But the vast majority were somewhere on the spectrum from disappointment to distress.
Beyond the personal stories of upset, the airlines are seething. The collective financial hit from lost revenue, care costs and the expense of retrieving aircraft from the many and various locations where they landed in a hurry on Friday morning is, I estimate conservatively, £100m. More than half of that loss will be sustained by British Airways. Longer term, BA will take a reputational hit even though the latest meltdown was way beyond its control.
For British Airways, transfer passengers comprise an essential part of the business mix. Heathrow airport is in competition against the key continental hubs: Amsterdam, Paris CDG and Frankfurt… where champagne corks were popping on Friday night after another Great British meltdown. If the UK’s flagship airport earns (more of) a reputation for chaos, then travellers who have a choice of how to get from Athens to Atlanta will choose another route.
You can tell things are going really badly when BA suspends its “middle-seat empty” policy in Club Europe to free up more seats for stranded passengers. The last time it happened? When recovering the Nats air-traffic control computer failure over the August bank holiday in 2023.
Once again, the UK looks a bit of a laughing stock. Any more of this and I will start a line of travel chaos T-shirts: choose between “Stranded in Shannon, 21 March 2025” and “24 hours in Gatwick, August 2023”. There is no slack in the system, and once again the passenger pays the price.
Simon Calder, also known as The Man Who Pays His Way, has been writing about travel for The Independent since 1994. In his weekly opinion column, he explores a key travel issue – and what it means for you.
