Some flights began to land at London’s Heathrow Airport late on Friday after a fire at a power station grounded planes at Europe’s busiest air hub, causing travel chaos for thousands of people around the world.

The electricity substation fire shut down the airport for most of the day, leading to the cancellation or diversion of hundreds of flights and raising questions about the infrastructure’s vulnerability.

An AFP journalist saw planes landing on the tarmac at Heathrow late on Friday, while British Airways said it had received clearance to depart eight long-haul flights from 1900 GMT to cities including Johannesburg, Singapore and Riyadh.

Earlier, an airport spokesperson said “some flights” could begin taking off and that the first would be “repatriation flights and relocating aircraft”.

Restrictions on overnight flights have also been temporarily lifted to help ease congestion, according to the UK’s transport department.

Heathrow Airport’s chief executive Thomas Woldbye said, “Tomorrow, we expect to be back in full operation”.

He apologised and said the decision to close the airport came after a backup transformer failed, meaning the power supply had to be restructured.

“We have lost power equal to that of a mid-sized city,” he said, calling it an “incident of major severity”.

Planes from Heathrow serve around 80 countries, and around 1,350 flights had been due to land or take off from the airport’s five terminals on Friday, according to the Flightradar24 tracking website.

Around 230,000 passengers use Heathrow every day — 83 million a year — making it one of the world’s busiest airports.

Late on Friday the London Fire Brigade said the fire was “believed to be non-suspicious” and that an investigation would “focus on the electrical distribution equipment”.

It came after London’s Metropolitan Police said the force’s Counter Terrorism Command was leading the investigation into the fire given its impact.

“While there is currently no indication of foul play we retain an open mind at this time,” a spokesman said earlier.

Firefighters were called to the blaze shortly after 2320 GMT on Thursday and had brought it under control by 0800 GMT on Friday.

The outage left 100,000 homes without power overnight. Electricity distribution network National Grid said that at around 1400 GMT power had been partially restored to Heathrow as well as to local residents affected.

“We need to understand what caused an incident of this magnitude at an electricity substation that is very close to a critical piece of national infrastructure,” said Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander.


https://punchng.com/heathrow-airport-flights-resume-after-fire-causes-global-travel-chaos/