Heathrow fire: Neso says power was restored to airport seven hours before flights resumed
Mystery still surrounds the cause of a fire which knocked out Heathrow Airport for almost 24 hours this year.
But a new reports has found that power was restored to the airport’s terminals seven hours before flights resumed.
The chaos came after a substation fire in nearby Hayes, west London, which killed the airport’s power supply.
An interim report by the National Energy System Operator (Neso) found the flow of electricity to all four of the west London airport’s passenger terminals was restarted by 10.56am on March 21. Flights did not resume until approximately 6pm.
Neso said power was restored to the “wider Heathrow Airport Limited network” by 2.23pm.
That was followed by “a period of safety checking” to ensure “safety-critical systems were fully operational prior to passengers arriving at the airport”.
More than 270,000 air passenger journeys were disrupted by the closure.
The fire at the nearby North Hyde substation started late the previous evening. The cause of the fire remains unknown.
Heathrow had been warned about its power supply in the days before it closed, MPs were told last month.
Nigel Wicking, chief executive of Heathrow Airline Operators Committee, which represents airlines that use the west London airport, said there were a “couple of incidents” which made him concerned. He also claimed then that Heathrow’s Terminal 5 could have re-opened by “late morning” on the day of the shutdown.
Mr Wicking 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.”