.jpg?20250328')
London’s Heathrow Airport resumed full operations and ordered a probe into how it dealt with a power outage that shut Europe’s busiest air hub for almost a day as airlines warned of further delays and cancellations.
British Airways, whose main hub is Heathrow, said it had operated around 90 per cent of its schedule on Saturday and promised a ‘near-full’ schedule for yesterday after chief executive Sean Doyle on Friday warned the ‘huge impact’ would last days.
The airport had been due to handle 1,351 flights on Friday, flying up to 291,000 passengers. But the fire at a nearby electrical substation forced planes to be diverted to other airports and many long-haul flights returned to their point of departure.
Britain’s energy ministry said it had commissioned the National Energy System Operator to carry out an urgent investigation into the outage that raised questions about the resilience of the country’s critical infrastructure.
Heathrow said it had tasked an independent board member, former transport minister Ruth Kelly, with undertaking a review of the airport’s crisis-management plan and its response to the incident with the aim of boosting resilience.
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.
&uuid=(email))