MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Officials at London's Heathrow Airport say some flights will take off tonight. That's after a fire nearby caused a major power outage and shut down one of the world's busiest travel hubs for most of the day. The airport says it hopes to have full service up and running by Saturday. NPR's Fatima Al-Kassab reports from London on a day of travel chaos.
FATIMA AL-KASSAB, BYLINE: All day today, the skies over Europe's busiest airport have been quiet, its terminals plunged into darkness and its runways silent. Heathrow Airport was forced to completely shut down after a fire broke out overnight at a nearby electricity substation that supplies the airport with power. The CEO of Heathrow Airport, Thomas Woldbye, told local media that this was an unprecedented incident, and there was no option but to close the airport down completely.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
THOMAS WOLDBYE: This has been an incident of major severity. It's not a small fire. We have lost power equal to that of a midsize city, and our backup systems have been working as they should, but then they are not sized to run the entire airport.
AL-KASSAB: It took dozens of firefighters hours to get the blaze under control in west London, where tens of thousands of homes were left without power and thousands of local residents had to be evacuated. More than 1,300 flights were canceled with hundreds of thousands of passengers affected globally. Passengers were stranded around the world, as planes had to land in other cities - Munich, Paris, or Reykjavik. Others had to turn back where they came from. I reached Sandeep Mahay in a hotel room he'd managed to book in Jamaica, where his plane had been sent back to not long after he and his wife had taken off.
SANDEEP MAHAY: We were in the air for about 3, 3 1/2 hours. So then all of a sudden, we had a message on the communications from the captain saying that there's a big fire near London Heathrow, and the airport is shut, so we can't land there.
AL-KASSAB: He said their plans are still uncertain.
MAHAY: Yeah, we don't know when we're going to return back home. We really want to go back home. We had big plans this weekend, celebrating my wife's brother's birthday, and we're going to miss it. So we have no idea when we're going to, you know, fly back to Heathrow (ph).
AL-KASSAB: Adam Brown was on a British Airways plane en route from Washington to London. He spoke to the BBC.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ADAM BROWN: Somewhere over the Atlantic, like, around 2 a.m. Eastern Time, an announcement came over and said that there was a fire at Heathrow and that electricity was out and that we had been diverted to go back to the Washington D.C. airport. So there were groans and grumbles, of course, and some confusion and slumber. And then we got ready and turned around and came back to the airport.
AL-KASSAB: Flights to and from the U.S. were hit hard, aviation analyst Sally Gethin told NPR.
SALLY GETHIN: A large amount of airlines affected are the U.S. carriers. So particularly American Airlines had to divert a lot of flights today and overnight. So there's been quite a substantial impact on U.S. travelers and also U.K. domestic travelers returning to the U.K. from the United States.
AL-KASSAB: She says that even when flights do get up and running, the impact of the closure will be felt for some days to come.
GETHIN: And it will continue to have this domino effect into next week. When there's a problem, you know, at a major hub airport, it impacts the whole of the air traffic system.
AL-KASSAB: Counterterrorism police are leading the investigation. London's Metropolitan Police say there is currently no indication of foul play, but officers were treating this with an open mind. Whatever the cause, the incident has raised concerns over how a major piece of national infrastructure could be brought down so completely and for so long. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said this afternoon, there would be questions to answer. Fatima Al-Kassab, NPR News, London. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.