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 cancelled 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.

Airlines continue to scramble to deal with the aftermath

“We don’t expect any major amount of flights to be cancelled or delayed. There are some cancellations 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 cancellations, Heathrow’s departures website showed.

British Airways, whose main hub is Heathrow, said it expected around 85 per cent 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 travelling customers will experience delays as we continue to navigate the challenges posed by Fridays 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 travelling 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.

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, but planes were diverted to other airports.

Published in Dawn, March 23rd, 2025