Heathrow Airport in London, one of the world’s busiest air hubs, resumed full operations on Saturday. But after a fire at an electrical substation halted operations for most of Friday, global travel remained disrupted.
The police were still investigating what had caused the fire at the substation in western London that cut power to tens of thousands of nearby homes as well as to Heathrow. The Metropolitan Police said there was no immediate indication of foul play.
A Heathrow representative said on Saturday that the airport had hundreds of additional employees on duty and added flights to the day’s schedule to accommodate 10,000 extra passengers. An average of 229,000 people a day traveled through the airport last year.
British Airways, Heathrow’s largest carrier, said late Friday that it expected about 85 percent of its nearly 600 departures and arrivals scheduled for Saturday to go ahead but that delays were likely to affect all passengers. The airline said it was also canceling flights on high-frequency routes where passengers have more rebooking options.
It took 16 hours to end the disruption that began in the early morning hours of Friday. More than a thousand flights were diverted, wreaking havoc on more than a quarter of a million people’s travel plans, Cirium, an aviation data company, estimated.
Arrivals resumed Friday evening. A Heathrow representative said significant delays were expected in the coming days as airlines tried to return their planes to their usual schedules.
Planes from all over the world were heading to Heathrow early Saturday, including from Hong Kong, South Africa and Brazil, according to Flightradar24, a tracking website.
Thomas Woldbye, Heathrow’s chief executive, said that at the time of the substation fire, a backup transformer was working as it should when the airport lost power but that it was not enough to run the entire facility. The London Fire Brigade said that it had been difficult to extinguish the blaze because the substation held thousands of gallons of cooling oil.
Britain’s National Grid said that the substation’s network was reconfigured to partly restore power temporarily to the airport and other customers.
The fire and Heathrow’s shutdown raised broader questions about Britain’s infrastructure. Willie Walsh, the director general of the International Air Transport Association, a global trade association of airlines, criticized what he said was the airport’s failure to prepare for the outage.
“How is it that critical infrastructure — of national and global importance — is totally dependent on a single power source without an alternative,” he said in a statement. “If that is the case — as it seems — then it is a clear planning failure by the airport.”
