Airlines warned Heathrow about power supply days before shutdown

Heathrow Airport was warned about the “resilience” of its power supply in the days before a fire which shut down the airport for over a day last month.

Nigel Wicking, chief executive of the Heathrow Airline Operators’ Committee, told a group of MPs on Wednesday that he spoke to the Team Heathrow director on 15 March about his concerns.

Chief executive Thomas Woldbye apologised to the nearly 300,000 passengers whose journeys were disrupted by the closure on 21 March, which was caused by a fire at a nearby electrical substation.

He offered his “deepest regrets” adding that the “situation was unprecedented”.

He added that he recognised “the considerable inconvenience and concern it caused”.

Speaking to MPs on the transport committee, Mr Wicking said he expressed his concerns “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”.

Runway lights are critical to the safety of passengers.

“That obviously made me concerned, and as such I’d raised the point. I wanted to understand better the overall resilience of the airport.”

Mr Wicking added: “It is the most expensive airport in the world, with regard passenger charges, so from our perspective, that means we should actually have the best service, we should have the best infrastructure.”

He said he had spoken to the Team Heathrow director on 15 March about his concerns – six days before the fire – and the chief operating officer and chief customer officer on 19 March.

On the day of the shutdown, airlines had to divert 120 aircraft, which is “not a light decision to be made in any context”, he added.

As a consequence, when Mr Wicking joined a call with NATs, the national air traffic service, at 05:30, “they’d run out of space within the UK for aircraft to divert”.

“Aircraft were then going to Europe, and then some were even halfway across Europe and going back to base in India,” he said. “So, quite a level of disruption for those passengers, let alone all of the cancellations”.

Mr Woldbye said Heathrow realised “during the early hours” of Friday 21 March that “we were losing power to the airport”.

“In our operations centre you would seen all the red lights go, that the systems were powering down,” he said. “We had no information as to why.”

“We then had a slightly later stage call from the fire department that the substation was on fire,” he said.

Heathrow is supplied by three substations, but knocking out one caused loss of power to the airport.

Mr Woldbye said a third of the airport was powering down and that Terminal 2 was particularly affected, along with certain central systems. He added that it became “first and foremost a safety situation”.

“We need to make sure, when a crisis happens, that people are safe,” he said.

Safety critical systems such as runway, runway lighting and the control tower “switched in as they should”, however, he said.