Heathrow Airport CEO Thomas Woldbye says keeping London airport open during power outage would have 'stranded tens of thousands of people'

Thomas Woldbye appeared before the Transport Select Committee today (2 April) to explain the sequence of events that led to more than 1,400 flights being diverted or cancelled. A fire broke out in a transformer within an electrical substation in Hayes, north of Heathrow, late in the evening of Thursday 20 March. In the early hours of Friday morning, 21 March, Heathrow announced it would close until at least midnight – though later that evening some flights were allowed to depart.

Heathrow, and the many businesses its activities support, particularly in west London, also lost millions. The emotional impact for the 250,000-plus passengers whose flights were cancelled or diverted was immense – with some people missing important family events including weddings and funerals.

Today Mr Woldbye said keeping the airport open during last month’s power outage would have been “disastrous”. He told the Transport Select Committee: “It became quite clear we could not operate the airport safely quite early in this process, and that is why we closed the airport.

“If we had not done that, we would have had thousands of passengers stranded at the airport at high-risk to personal injury, gridlocked roads around the airport, because don’t forget 65,000 houses and other institutions were powered down. Traffic lights didn’t work, just to give you an example, many things didn’t work. Parts of the civil infrastructure didn’t work.

“So the risk of having literally tens of thousands of people stranded at the airport, where we have would have nowhere to put them, we could not process them, would have been a disastrous scenario.” When asked if the closure of Heathrow would always have been part of the plan, he said: “In the circumstances where we cannot secure the 100% safe operation of the airport, yes.”

“The fact that the lights were on at Terminal 5, which is entirely correct, doesn’t mean the terminal was operational. We didn’t have all CCTV, we didn’t have fire surveillance.

“The fire systems would work… but the fire surveillance systems of the airport was down, so we didn’t know where the systems were up and safe. All that had to be secured before we started operation.”

However, a leading Heathrow executive said he had warned the airport about concerns with its substations in the days before it had to close. Nigel Wicking, chief executive of the Heathrow Airline Operators’ Committee, said he spoke to the Team Heathrow director on March 15 about his concerns, and the chief operating officer and chief customer officer two days before the March 21 shutdown.

He told the Transport Select Committee in Parliament: “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.” Mr Wicking said he believed Heathrow’s Terminal 5 could have been ready to receive repatriation flights by “late morning” on the day of the closure, and that “there was opportunity also to get flights out”.