Heathrow reopens and chaos eases, but critics say the airport’s shutdown exposes UK vulnerability

LONDON: London’s Heathrow Airport resumed full operations on Saturday, a day after a fire knocked out its power supply and shut Europe’s busiest airport, causing global travel chaos.
Some flights were canceled or delayed as the travel industry scrambled to reroute passengers and fix battered airline schedules after the huge fire at an electrical substation serving the airport.
Resumed flights had begun on Friday evening, but the shuttering of the world’s fifth-busiest airport for most of the day left tens of thousands searching for scarce hotel rooms and replacement seats while airlines tried to return jets and crew to bases.
Operations were normal on Saturday morning, but airlines were still dealing with the aftermath, said the airport’s chief executive, Thomas Woldbye.
“We don’t expect any major amount of flights to be canceled or delayed. There are some cancelations and there are some delays. We are handling them in the same way as we would normally do,” Woldbye told BBC radio.
The vast majority of scheduled morning flights departed successfully on Saturday morning, with a handful of delays and cancelations, Heathrow’s departures website showed.
British Airways, whose main hub is Heathrow, said it expected around 85 percent of its schedule of almost 600 departures and arrivals to proceed on Saturday.
“We are planning to operate as many flights as possible to and from Heathrow on Saturday, but to recover an operation of our size after such a significant incident is extremely complex,” the airline said in a statement.
“It is likely that all traveling customers will experience delays as we continue to navigate the challenges posed by Friday’s power outage at the airport.”
A Heathrow spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the airport had “hundreds of additional colleagues on hand in our terminals and we have added flights to today’s schedule to facilitate an extra 10,000 passengers traveling through the airport.”
The travel industry, facing the prospect of a financial hit costing tens of millions of pounds and a likely fight over who should pay, questioned how such crucial infrastructure could fail without backup.
“It is a clear planning failure by the airport,” said Willie Walsh, head of global airlines body IATA, who, as former head of British Airways, has for years been a fierce critic of the crowded hub.
Police said that after an initial assessment they were not treating the incident as suspicious, although enquiries remained ongoing. London Fire Brigade said its investigations would focus on the electrical distribution equipment.
The airport had been due to handle 1,351 flights on Friday, flying up to 291,000 passengers, but planes were diverted to other airports in Britain and across Europe, while many long-haul flights returned to their point of departure.
Woldbye, asked on Friday who would pay for the disruption, said there were “procedures in place,” adding “we don’t have liabilities in place for incidents like this.”
Restrictions on overnight flights were temporarily lifted by Britain’s Department of Transport to ease congestion, but British Airways Chief Executive Sean Doyle said the closure was set to have a “huge impact on all of our customers flying with us over the coming days.”
Virgin Atlantic said it expected to operate “a near full schedule” with limited cancelations on Saturday but that the situation remained dynamic and all flights would be kept under continuous review.
Airlines including JetBlue, American Airlines, Air Canada, Air India, Delta Air Lines, Qantas, United Airlines, British Airways and Virgin were diverted or returned to their origin airports in the wake of the closure, according to data from flight analytics firm Cirium.
Shares in many airlines fell on Friday.
Aviation experts said the last time European airports experienced disruption on such a large scale was the 2010 Icelandic volcanic ash cloud that grounded some 100,000 flights.
They warned that some passengers forced to land in Europe may have to stay in transit lounges if they lack the paperwork to leave the airport.
Prices at hotels around Heathrow jumped, with booking sites offering rooms for 500 pounds ($645), roughly five times the normal price levels.
Police said after an initial assessment, they were not treating the incident at the power substation as suspicious, although enquiries remained ongoing. London Fire Brigade said its investigations would focus on the electrical distribution equipment.
Heathrow and London’s other major airports have been hit by other outages in recent years, most recently by an automated gate failure and an air traffic system meltdown, both in 2023.

ISTANBUL: After his third night in custody, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu was to appear before prosecutors Saturday, just hours after hundreds of thousands hit the streets across Turkiye in a massive show of defiance.
It was the third straight night that protesters had rallied against the arrest of Imamoglu — the biggest political rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose arrest early Wednesday sparked Turkiye’s biggest street protests in more than a decade.
After an evening of clashes in Istanbul, Ankara and the western city of Izmir between protesters and riot police, who fired tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon to disperse them, the security forces arrested 97 people, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said.
And media reports said police had raided scores of homes overnight, although there was no immediate confirmation of the number detained.
The 53-year-old mayor, who was arrested just days before the CHP was to name him their candidate for the 2028 presidential race, was speaking to police on Saturday morning in connection with the “terror” probe, party sources told AFP.
He was then expected to appear before prosecutors at Caglayan courthouse at 1800 GMT to be questioned in both the graft and the terror probes, they said.
Already named in a growing list of legal probes, Imamoglu — who was resoundingly re-elected last year — has been accused alongside six others of “aiding and abetting a terrorist organization” — namely the banned Kurdish militant group PKK.
He is also under investigation for “bribery, extortion, corruption, aggravated fraud, and illegally obtaining personal data for profit as part of a criminal organization” along with 99 other suspects.
He was questioned by police for six hours Friday about the graft allegations, the party said.
“Mr Imamoglu denies all the charges against him,” one of his lawyers, Mehmet Pehlivan said.
“The detention was aimed at undermining Mr.Imamoglu’s reputation in the eyes of society,” he wrote on X early on Saturday, saying both probes were “based on untrue allegations” and “a violation of the right to a fair trial.”
Demonstrators across the country were due to rally again on Saturday night.
In a message on X sent via his lawyers, Imamoglu said he was “honored and proud” of the demonstrators who hit the streets in more than 50 of Turkiye’s 81 provinces, saying they were “protecting our republic, our democracy, the future of a just Turkiye, and the will of our nation.”
Addressing the crowds outside City Hall in Istanbul on Friday night, Ozgur Ozel, who heads the main opposition CHP, said 300,000 people had joined the demonstration in defiance of a protest ban and a sharp warning from Erdogan that Turkiye would not tolerate “street terror.”
As he spoke, the crowd cheered and applauded, waving flags and banners and chanting slogans like: “Don’t stay silent or it will be you next.”
The move against Imamoglu has hurt the Turkish lira and financial markets, with the stock exchange’s BIST 100 index closing down nearly eight percent on Friday.