FLIGHTMARE
Heathrow bosses were ‘warned of potential failures DAYS before major outage closed airport & sparked travel chaos’
The mass shutdown is estimated to have cost the airline industry over £60m
AIRPORT bosses were warned about serious concerns over Heathrow’s power supply just days before a substation fire forced a mass shutdown, MPs have heard.
Top airline rep Nigel Wicking said he raised the alarm twice in the run-up to the outage that plunged more than 270,000 passengers into chaos.
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He told the Transport Select Committee previous cable thefts had already knocked out runway lights, prompting him to question the airport’s resilience.
The Heathrow Airline Operators Committee chief said: “It was 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.
“That obviously made me concerned and, as such, I raised the point I wanted to understand better the overall resilience of the airport.”
Heathrow later insisted Mr Wicking was referring to matters which had “no relation” to the North Hyde substation which caught fire.
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An airport source said: “To draw a comparison between these incidents is irresponsible.”
The blackout grounded flights until 6pm and resulted in more than 1000 flights to and from the airport being cancelled.
Mr Wicking also claimed Terminal 5 could have reopened by 10am, but Heathrow chiefs kept the airport shut for safety.
Heathrow boss Thomas Woldbye defended the decision, saying: “If we had got this wrong, we might be sitting here today having a very different discussion about why people got injured.”
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He told MPs it would cost over £1 billion to make Heathrow fully resilient to power failures - but said the airport can’t spend that kind of cash without airline backing.
Mr Wicking hit back, saying airlines “already pay enough” and shouldn’t fork out more for resilience that “should have been there in the first place”.
He revealed the shutdown cost airlines an estimated £60 million to £100 million.
At the start of the hearing, Mr Woldbye apologised to the passengers whose journeys were disrupted, adding that the "situation was unprecedented".
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