British government wants rigorous probe into Heathrow’s 18-hour power shutdown

“Qantas staff at [Heathrow] Terminal 5 were lovely, handing out water and food,” she told the newspaper. “A bit late in the day for it, really, considering we landed in Paris at 5am.”

Joshua Richardson, who was on the flight from Perth, told The Times he arrived at Heathrow after travelling more than 32 hours and still needed to get to Oxford.

“We first found out because the in-flight entertainment changed from Heathrow to Paris, and people were like, ‘What’s going on?’” he said.

“The pilot said Heathrow had lost power — the only place we could divert was Paris. We had to circle Paris for a bit, and you could see other planes circling, too. There’s going to be some stories of people being messed up by this, so I won’t complain. All I am is tired and cranky.”

Heathrow Airport’s chief executive, Thomas Woldbye, apologised for the disruption but defended its response to the incident, saying “this is as big as it gets for our airport”. He admitted to reporters outside the airport that Heathrow’s power was “a bit of a weak point”.

British media reported airline chiefs had accused the airport of “clear failure”. The Telegraph quoted former defence secretary Gavin Williamson, a Conservative, as saying: “This is a colossal failure of Heathrow Airport. They have failed to build in the resilience that is required to ensure this level of disruption does not happen.”

The publication said expansion plans by the consortium that owns the facility, including for a dedicated power station, have been delayed for a decade.

The disruption fell short of the that caused by the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which spewed clouds of ash into the atmosphere and created trans-Atlantic air travel chaos for months.

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“I’d like to stress that this has been an incident of major severity. It’s not a small fire,” he said.

Woldbye said the airport expected to return to “100 per cent operation” on Saturday after an “unprecedented” day of disruption, telling reporters that passengers should come to the airport as they normally would and not earlier.

Heathrow had its busiest January on record earlier this year, with more than 6.3 million passengers, up more than 5 per cent from the same period last year.

It is usually closed to all flights except for emergency diversions between 10.55pm and 6am daily, with a strictly limited number of arrivals scheduled from 4.45am onwards.

The British government temporarily lifted restrictions on overnight flights to help clear the backlog.

with AP

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