Heathrow Airport reopens after shutdown, travellers face days of disruption

LONDON (Reuters) -London's Heathrow Airport resumed full operations on Saturday, a day after a fire knocked out its power supply and shut Europe's busiest air hub, but airlines warned of delays and cancellations as schedules are fixed and affected passengers are rerouted.

British Airways, whose main hub is Heathrow, said it expected around 85% of its schedule to proceed on Saturday, and chief executive Sean Doyle warned of a "huge impact on all of our customers flying with us over the coming days."

The airport, the world's fifth-busiest, 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 on Saturday it had commissioned the National Energy System Operator to carry out an urgent investigation into the outage.

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.

The vast majority of scheduled morning and early afternoon flights departed successfully on Saturday, with a handful of delays and cancellations, Heathrow's departures website showed.

"We don't expect any major amount of flights to be cancelled or delayed," Heathrow chief executive Thomas Woldbye told BBC radio. "There are some cancellations and there are some delays. We are handling them in the same way as we would normally do."

The airport has hundreds of additional staff on hand to facilitate an extra 10,000 passengers travelling through the airport, a spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Restrictions on overnight flights were temporarily lifted by Britain's Department for Transport to ease congestion.

But airlines were still left dealing with disrupted schedules the tens of thousands of passengers whose journeys had been interrupted.

"To recover an operation of our size after such a significant incident is extremely complex," British Airways said in a statement.

Virgin Atlantic said on Saturday that it was planning to run a near-full schedule with limited cancellations. Air India said it had restarted flights to and from Heathrow and expected to operate "as per schedule".

FIRE NOT SUSPICIOUS

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 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.

"It is a clear planning failure by the airport," said Willie Walsh, head of global airlines body IATA, who, as former head of British Airways, has for years been a fierce critic of the crowded hub.

Heathrow and London's other major airports have been hit by other outages in recent years, most recently by an automated gate failure and an air traffic system meltdown, both in 2023.

Heathrow's Woldbye, asked on Friday who would pay for the disruption, said there were "procedures in place", adding "we don't have liabilities in place for incidents like this".

Prices at hotels around Heathrow jumped, with booking sites offering rooms for 500 pounds ($645), roughly five times the normal price levels.

($1 = 0.7741 pounds)

(Reporting by London bureau; Writing by Conor Humphries; Editing by David Gregorio , WIlliam Mallard and Timothy Heritage)