The Latest: Heathrow coming back to life hours after fire shut down busy hub

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The first plane has taken off from Heathrow Airport after a day-long closure sparked by a nearby fire grounded hundreds of flights.

After power was restored, a British Airways jet touched down just before sunset on Friday after Heathrow lifted its closure order. Further arrivals followed, including a short flight from Manchester in northwest England.

A British Airways flight to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia took off from Heathrow just before 9 p.m. (2100GMT). British Airways says it will run eight long-haul flights on Friday night. The airport plans to operate full schedule on Saturday, but disruption is expected to last for days.

Heathrow Airport stirred back to life late Friday, with flights slowly resuming about 18 hours after an inferno at an electrical substation caused a power outage that shuttered Europe’s busiest air travel hub and left 200,00 passengers stranded.

A British Airways jet touched down just before sunset after Heathrow lifted its closure order that disrupted global travel for hundreds of thousands of passengers. Further arrivals followed, including a short-haul flight from Manchester in northwest England.

The first departure was scheduled for later Friday. The British government temporarily lifted restrictions on overnight flights to help clear the backlog.

Heathrow’s shutdown had a massive impact on international travel because it is the busiest airport in Europe and one of the busiest in the world.

OAG, a travel-data provider based in the U.K., provided some statistics on Heathrow and the flights canceled.

— Heathrow is the fifth largest airport in the world and second largest for international capacity.

— More than 1,300 flights had been scheduled Friday.

— British Airways, which has its main base at Heathrow, was the operator of more than half of those flights.

— Destinations that were most impacted, included New York’s JFK, which had flights canceled with 5,300 seats of capacity; Dubai with 4,500 seats and Frankfurt with 3,000 seats.

The first plane has landed at London’s Heathrow Airport since a fire at an electrical substation shuttered Europe’s busiest air travel hub.

The British Airways jet touched down on Friday about 18 hours after the airport was closed due to a massive power outage.

Heathrow had canceled all flights for the day but was able to resume some after electricity was restored.

Heathrow’s boss has apologized for the disruption caused by the airport’s daylong closure, but says there was no choice but to shut the airport for safety reasons.

Chief Executive Thomas Woldbye said “we would not shut down the airport unless we had severe safety concerns.”

More than 1,300 flights due to take off or land were disrupted Friday, affecting more than 200,000 passengers, after a fire ripped through an electrical substation near the airport.

Woldbye said Heathrow drew power from three substations and two are still working. He said that is enough to restore power, but it was necessary to restructure the electricity supply after the fire to get Heathrow back up and running.

Woldbye rejected suggestions that Heathrow did not have adequate contingency plans, saying the incident was “unprecedented” and “all our procedures have been working as they should.”

He said “contingencies of certain sizes we cannot guard ourselves against 100% and this is one of them.”

British Airways chief executive Sean Doyle says the closure of Heathrow Airport will have a “huge impact” on passengers even after it reopens.

Heathrow is BA’s base and it is the airline most affected by the shutdown. Doyle said the airline had been due to operate more than 670 flights carrying more than 100,000 passengers on Friday.

Passengers booked to fly to or from Heathrow on Saturday or Sunday are being given the option to rebook to a later date for free.

In a video to customers, Doyle said: “We hope that power will be restored as soon as possible. But even when that does happen, this incident will have a substantial impact on our airline and customers for many days to come, with disruption to journeys expected over the coming days.”

Travelers say power is back on at one of the two Heathrow Airport terminals left in the dark after a fire at an electricity substation.

Lights came back on at Terminal 4 on Friday afternoon. Firefighters earlier said that terminals 2 and 4 at the airport had lost all power after the blaze. Heathrow shut the airport to all arriving and departing flights until at least midnight.

Electricity distributor National Grid said it had found an “interim solution” that reconfigured its network, allowing electricity to be restored to all customers, including Heathrow.

It’s unclear whether power to the airport has been fully restored.

Heathrow is facing questions about how it could be shut down by a fire at a single substation 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) away.

The airport said it has emergency backup systems that worked as expected, but they are not enough to run the whole airport.

Willie Walsh, director general of airline industry group IATA, took to social media to lambaste Heathrow’s management.

“Firstly, 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 post from IATA’s account on social media platform X. “If that is the case — as it seems — then it is a clear planning failure by the airport.”

He also questioned whether it was fair that airlines are solely responsible for “picking up the tab when infrastructure fails.”

Stranded travelers looking for somewhere to stay until they can fly out of Heathrow faced the possibility of jacked-up prices for rooms because hotels are “capitalizing on a huge spike in demand”, warned Tim Hentschel, CEO of booking platform HotelPlanner.com.

In one example from the company’s website, the Crowne Plaza at Heathrow’s Terminal Four was charging 485 pounds ($627) for a room on Friday, compared with 140 pounds for the same time next week.

“Hotels near major transport hubs like Heathrow often see price fluctuations during such crises, as supply struggles to meet the sudden demand,” Hentschel said. He added that “there is also an essence of the hospitality industry price gouging to cash in on unfortunate circumstances, which is a real shame.”

United Airlines says that it is offering a travel waiver to its customers while Heathrow is closed so that they can switch to eligible flights to Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris or Edinburgh. The airline said that all flights scheduled to arrive at Heathrow on Friday are canceled due to the closure.

Eurostar says it is adding two additional trains between London and Paris to accommodate passengers stranded by Heathrow’s shutdown.

The high-speed train that goes beneath the English Channel said it was increasing capacity by 882 passengers per train on Friday.

Heathrow Airport says it doesn’t know when power will be restored and expects disruption to last for days.

The airport said in a statement it does not have “clarity on when power may be reliably restored.”

It said it expects “significant disruption over the coming days and passengers should not travel to the airport under any circumstances until the airport reopens.”

Heathrow earlier said the airport is not expected to reopen until Saturday.

While the cause of the fire that shut down Heathrow Airport is still unclear, analysts say the incident raises concerns about the U.K.’s ability to withstand attacks or natural disasters that damage critical infrastructure such as communications and power networks.

It’s particularly worrisome given recent comments by Britain’s security services that Russia is conducting a reckless campaign of sabotage across Europe, said Alan Mendoza, the executive director of the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based think tank focused on security and democracy in Europe.

“The U.K.’s critical national infrastructure is not sufficiently hardened for anywhere near the level it would need to be at to give us confidence this won’t happen again,” Mendoza said.

“I mean, if one fire can shut down Heathrow’s primary systems and then apparently the backup systems as well, it tells you something’s badly wrong with our system of management of such disasters,” he added.

The Heathrow disruption weighed on shares of European airlines, which posted declines that outpaced the fall in broader main stock indexes on Friday.

Shares of International Airlines Group, which owns British Airways, were down 1.4% after falling as much as 3% in early trading. Shares of Lufthansa, which operates Germany’s biggest carrier as well as Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines and others, fell 1.3%. Air France-KLM, which operates the main carriers in France the Netherlands, slid 1.3%.

German leisure and tourism company TUI, which owns five airlines including one that serves the British market, slid 1.8%. Other European airlines that don’t operate at Heathrow were also dragged down by the negative sentiment. Wizz Air shares declined 1.4%, easyJet was down 0.7% and Ryanair dipped 0.8.

The British government says “clearly there are questions to answer” about how a single fire could shut down Europe’s busiest airport.

A spokesperson for Prime Minister Keir Starmer said there must be a rigorous investigation to make sure “this scale of disruption does not happen again.”

Tom Wells said the most pressing task is to extinguish the fire, which is still burning on Friday. He said that “at the moment the priority is to deal with the incident in hand.”

He said “it’s very premature” to speculate on the cause of the blaze.

Flight operations remained normal in the United States on Friday despite the Heathrow fire, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

Delta Airlines has issued a travel waiver through Sunday for customers who need to rebook their flights due to the Heathrow fire, a spokesperson said in a statement.

The company canceled 10 flights scheduled to depart from Heathrow on Friday.

Police say there is so far no indication of foul play in blaze that shut Heathrow but counterterror detectives leading the investigation into its cause.

The Metropolitan Police force says that is because of the location of the electrical substation fire and its impact on critical national infrastructure.

The force says counterterrorism command has “specialist resources and capabilities” that can help find the cause quickly.

The Heathrow closure is drawing comparisons to the 2010 Icelandic volcano eruption that closed much of European airspace for five days out of fears volcanic ash could damage jet engines.

The eruption of the volcano Eyjafjallajokull (ay-yah-FYAH’-lah-yer-kuhl), after two centuries of silence, spewed an ash cloud that closed Europe’s airspace and grounded millions of travelers. Iceland was briefly infamous as the country that stopped the world.

Read more about Iceland’s tourism boom in the aftermath of the 2010 eruption.

Scandinavian Airlines has canceled all 12 of its flights to and from London Heathrow on Friday.

“We are closely monitoring the situation and remain in continuous dialogue with Heathrow. Naturally, we hope for a swift resolution,” the company said in a statement.

Known as SAS, it’s considered the national airline of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

At Heathrow’s Terminal 5, a family of five traveling to Dallas had shown up in the hopes their flight home — still listed as delayed — would take off.

But when Andrea Sri brought her brother, sister-in-law and their three children to the airport, they were told by police that there would be no flight.

“It was a waste of time. Very confusing,” said Sri, who lives in London. “We tried to get in touch with British Airways, but they don’t open their telephone line until 8 a.m.”

Heathrow is one of the world’s biggest airports, but there are five others in the wider London area as well.

Travelers might be able to rebook through the remaining five airports -- City, Gatwick, Luton, Stansted and Southend -- in the aftermath of Heathrow’s closure.

However, they aren't all easy to reach from Heathrow. While City is in inner London, and buses link Heathrow with Gatwick, the others are further out. Southend is about a 78-mile drive from Heathrow, around the congested M25 orbital highway and then out to the eastern coast of England.

LONDON — Residents in west London have described hearing a large explosion, followed by a fireball and clouds of smoke, when a blaze ripped through an electrical substation near Heathrow Airport.

Matthew Muirhead, who was working a night shift, said that at about 11:30 p.m. Thursday he saw smoke rising over trees, then “a bright flash of white and all the lights in town went out.”

Delivery driver Adeel Anwar said the heat and billowing smoke from the blaze were “absolutely apocalyptic.” He told Sky News that as he drove past the substation “I just felt the heat … I tried to just get out of the area as quick as possible.”

Firefighters brought the blaze under control after seven hours and were still working to douse the flames on Friday. No injuries were reported.

Electricity supplier National Grid said power was restored to 62,000 customers by Friday morning, with 4,900 still without electricity.

Any travelers impacted by the Heathrow closure should contact their airline.

If a phone call doesn’t go through, travelers can also try contacting the airline on social media. Several airlines were responding to passengers’ posts on social platform X on Friday. A representative for British Airways, for example, was telling customers on X to send a direct message to the airline’s account so they could assist in rebooking.

For customers who are seeking a refund or other compensation, a European Union regulation known as EU261 could apply. Because the United Kingdom is no longer part of the EU, however, not every flight will be covered under EU261. The regulation covers flights within the EU, as well as flights departing from the EU to a non-EU country.

GLASGOW — Lawrence Hayes was three-quarters of the way to London from John F. Kennedy International in New York when Virgin Atlantic announced they were being diverted to Glasgow.

“It was a red-eye flight and I’d already had a full day, so I don’t even know how long I’ve been up for,” Hayes told the BBC as he was getting off the plane in Scotland. “Luckily I managed to get hold of my wife and she’s kindly booked me a train ticket to get back to Euston (railway station in London), but it’s going to be an incredibly long day.”

DUBLIN — Ryanair has added eight “rescue flights” between Dublin and Stansted, another London airport, on Friday and Saturday to help travelers impacted by the fire at Heathrow, the budget airline announced.

Ryanair does not operate at Heathrow.

Four of the flights will occur Friday afternoon, and the remaining on Saturday morning.

LONDON — British officials working to determine the cause of an electrical substation fire that shut Heathrow Airport have not yet found evidence it’s suspicious.

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband says “it’s too early to say” what caused the huge blaze, but there’s “no suggestion” of foul play.

London’s Metropolitan Police say the fire brigade is leading the investigation, suggesting it’s not thought to be criminal.

LONDON — Aviation consultant John Strickland says it will take several days for global airline travel to recover from a daylong closure of Heathrow Airport.

He said: “We’re talking about several days’ worth of disruption to get the planes recovered and start using them again to move planned and disrupted passengers.”

Strickland compared the disruption to “a contained version of 9/11 or, to an extent, the Icelandic volcanic eruption” that shut European airspace in 2010.

“I remembered seeing on those occasions – particularly more so on 9/11 – it happened so quick and then U.S. airspace was closed, they were turning back aircraft and holding planes. That’s the parallel I would make.

“Heathrow being such a busy airport and full, there’s no kind of wriggle room for getting out of these kind of things.”

The closure of Heathrow rippled through global aviation. The long-haul carrier Emirates in Dubai, which has London as one of its top destinations, canceled six round-trip flights to Heathrow on Friday alone.

Etihad in neighboring Abu Dhabi canceled two round-trip flights, while one flight diverted to Frankfurt, Germany. Qatar Airways said at least seven scheduled flights were “impacted,” with its staff working with passengers.