Heathrow bosses were ‘warned of potential failures DAYS before major outage closed airport & sparked travel chaos’
AIRPORT bosses were warned about serious concerns over Heathrow’s power supply just days before a substation fire forced a mass shutdown, MPs have heard.
Top airline rep Nigel Wicking revealed he flagged fears to top executives after several cable thefts knocked out critical systems – including runway lights.
He said he spoke to the Team Heathrow director on March 15, and then raised the alarm again with the chief operating officer and chief customer officer just two days before the March 21 blackout.
The airport was closed to all flights until around 6pm on March 21, after a major power outage caused by a fire at a nearby electricity substation which started late the night before.
The chaos disrupted more than 270,000 air passenger journeys and led to over 100 cancelled flights, leaving thousands of travellers stranded.
Appearing in front of the Commons’ Transport Select Committee, Mr Wicking said: It was following a couple of incidents of, unfortunately, theft of wire and cable around some of the power supply that, on one of those occasions, took out the lights on the runway for a period of time.
“That obviously made me concerned and, as such, I raised the point I wanted to understand better the overall resilience of the airport.”
The Heathrow Airline Operators Committee boss, which represents airlines that use the west London airport, also said he believed Heathrow’s Terminal 5 could have been ready to receive repatriation flights by “late morning” on the day of the closure, and that “there was opportunity also to get flights out”.
Meanwhile, airport chief Thomas Woldbye told MPs keeping the airport open during the outage would have been “disastrous”.
He said: “It became quite clear we could not operate the airport safely quite early in this process, and that is why we closed the airport.
“If we had not done that, we would have had thousands of passengers stranded at the airport at high risk to personal injury, gridlocked roads around the airport, because don’t forget 65,000 houses and other institutions were powered down.
“Traffic lights didn’t work, just to give you an example, many things didn’t work. Parts of the civil infrastructure didn’t work.
“So the risk of having literally tens of thousands of people stranded at the airport, where we have would have nowhere to put them, we could not process them, would have been a disastrous scenario.”