After more than a thousand flights were diverted or cancelled after a fire at an electrical substation near Heathrow Airport caused a power shutdown, an aviation expert has weighed in on the implications the incident has.
A fire at the North Hyde electrical substation in Hayes, west London, UK occurred at 11.23pm local time on Thursday 20 March, causing the power supply to Heathrow Airport and other businesses and homes to go dark.
This has meant that thousands of flights have been canceled, with many passengers scrambling to find alternative ways to their planned destinations.
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While the cause of the fire is not yet known, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told the BBC that the fire appeared to have also caused a back-up generator to fail too, leaving the airport in a dire situation.
At the moment, the airport has said it doesn't ‘have clarity on when power may be reliably restored’ and it will be closed until 11.59pm tonight, adding: “We will provide an update when more information on the resumption of operations is available.”
Sadly, those planning to travel will face ‘significant disruption over the coming days’.
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Even though this is occurring in the UK, you might expect the damage and ripple effect to only target immediate and surrounding areas, but according to an expert, it’s actually something that will be felt across the globe.
Alex Macheras, an aviation analyst, spoke to ABC about the impact the closure of Heathrow Airport will have on the world.
He explained that it is hard to understand how this could happen to ‘the world's busiest two runway airport’.
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He said: “This is the busiest airport in Europe, but plays a significant role in global air travel, and we know what happens in the UK when a couple centimetres of snow hits the southern area and everything grinds to a halt.”
He added that this is much worse than snow or a couple of hours of delays, as people begin to ‘realize that what we're talking about is the complete and total shutdown of Britain's Hub airport, the busiest in Europe, for the course of the entire day.’
Macheras explained that the ramifications of the shutdown are significant, as ‘there will be no flight departure or arrivals at Heathrow for the entire day with no word on whether or not operations will recommence tomorrow’,
He added: “To put that into context, there should have been around two hundred and twenty thousand passengers handled by Heathrow today - that equates to about 690 flight departures, and 690 flight arrivals.”
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Stating that ‘this is going to have a significant impact that will be felt globally’, he shared that there are also a lot of questions regarding ‘how a fire at a single substation, has taken down airport in the way that it has’ even though ‘backups were in place’.
He explained: “To put this into context, there is tremendous travel chaos that occurs when simply one airline like British Airways faces, an IT issue, which they tend to every few months or so, so you can imagine the sheer scale and volume of something like this, that is affecting, not just every airline, but affecting the whole area.”
Because of the disruption, he’s also alleged that ‘this is going to go down in recent commercial aviation history as perhaps the most significant airport shutdown of a recent times and that is because of the sheer scale of Heathrow' as it handles flights from all over the world which will now either be rerouted or canceled, costing travelers, airlines and the airport time and a lot of money.
Britt Jones