Heathrow warned about the power day before the outage caused a closure, MPS said

The Heathrow Airport was warned of its power source in the days before it was closed due to a shutdown, the MP reported.

Nigel Wicking, chief executive of the Heathrow Aviation Business Committee, which represents airlines using West London Airport, said there were “several incidents” that made him worried.

The airport was closed for all flights until around 6pm on March 21 after a power outage caused by a fire at a nearby electric substation that began late the night before.

This disrupts air passenger travel of over 270,000 people.

Wicking told Director Team Heathrow on March 15 that he spoke to the Transport Select Committee on concerns and on March 19th to Chief Operating Officer and Chief Customer Officer.

He said: “Unfortunately, it was following several incidents of some theft of the power supply and some cable theft.

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“It obviously made me worried, and raised the point I wanted to better understand the overall resilience of the airport.”

Wicking said he believed that Heathrow Terminal 5 was ready to receive his repatriated flight by “late morning” on the day it was closed, and he “had an opportunity to put out a flight.”

He proceeded as follows: “From a T5 perspective, it was my understanding from both British Airlines, but on the day, everything went well by 10am in the morning.”

Heathrow CEO Thomas Waldy appeared with Wicking and replied:

“So there’s a margin that our people have to make very serious safety decisions and that’s what they’re training and that’s what they’re doing and that requires that all systems be up and running, tested and safe.”

He told the committee: “It became clear that airports cannot be operated safely quite early in this process, so we closed the airport.

“If they didn’t, don’t forget that 65,000 homes and other agencies would have powered it on.

“The traffic lights didn’t work. For example, a lot of things just didn’t work. Some of the civil infrastructure didn’t work.

“So the risk of literally tens of thousands of people stuck at the airport would have been a disastrous scenario where we couldn’t handle them because we had no place to put them.”

Woldbye told the committee that the fired substation was “much largest” serving the airport with a capacity of 70 megawatts.

Asked if some of the airport terminals could reopen earlier, he said:

“We didn’t have all the CCTVs. There was no fire surveillance. The fire system works… But we didn’t know where the system was or was safe because the airport’s fire surveillance system was down.

“We had to secure it before we could start surgery.”

Woldbye added: “We cannot guarantee that the T5 opened an hour ago.

“We did everything we could to open as soon as possible because we fully understand the concerns that the airline has been deported, the deported passengers and get flights there.”

Woldbye said it would cost more than £1 billion for the airport to be “full resilient” from the blackouts.

Woldbye asked the committee if Heathrow would take 10 hours, which is estimated to be more resilient.

Woldbye said “it’s not an endless, seamless switchover for everything in the airport,” and the boss said, “we were at a stage where we didn’t know why it happened.”

Wicking said the shutdown cost the airlines between £60 million and £100 million.

He added that it is “unacceptable.” The impact of the substation failure was “not shared with us.”

Woldbye said the airport would need “twice the energy amount” to operate the planned third runway.

Wicking told MPS that the airline “don’t know about the basics of Heathrow,” explaining that last year’s “bagging system issues” had not been placed on the aircraft as planned.

He added: “It’s the most expensive airport in the world due to passenger fees, and the reality is that it doesn’t get the value of your money as an airline user or consumer.”

Woldbye argued that Heathrow is “the most efficient airport in Europe” in terms of passenger numbers per square meter.