Heathrow Airport has been criticised for its response to last month’s power cut before MPs of the Transport Committee.
Nick Wicking, Chief Executive of Heathrow Airline Operators’ Committee – which represents around 90 airlines at the airport – said he raised issues about the resilience of its power supply days earlier, after the theft of cable and wiring knocked out lights on a runway.
He said he’d spoken to the Team Heathrow Director on 15 March and the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Customer Officer on 19 March to get a better understanding of the ‘overall resilience’ of the airport.
On 21 March, a fire at an electricity substation in west London caused a total blackout at the airport, forcing it to ground 1,000 flights till around 6pm.
However, Mr Wicking said believed that Terminal 5 could have been ready to re-launch flights by ‘late morning’ on the day of the outage, but Heathrow Chief Executive Thomas Woldbye said keeping the airport open would have been ‘disastrous’.
He said there was a risk of tens of thousands of people being stranded at the airport because the surrounding area was also without power, causing chaos on the roads and railways.
Fire surveillance and CCTV systems were down as a result of having limited electricity, he added, meaning it would not have been safe to reopen.
The closure will cost airlines £60m to £100m, according to Mr Wicking. Due to Heathrow’s conditions of use, they’ll be unable to claim any of it back, he said, adding: “I just find it incredible that an airport can absolve itself of any liability whatsoever.”
Responding to the criticisms,Thomas Woldbye said: “Should we have further resilience? But that, of course, comes at a very high cost, and that is the discussion we have to have with airlines, because we cannot make investments without having airlines (agree to them).”
He said the cost of making Heathrow able to keep operating through a similar outage in future would cost up to £1 billion.
