LONDON: The closure of Britain’s Heathrow Airport is set to affect the global aviation system for days at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, experts say, posing questions about why better contingency planning was not in place at the hub.
Experts were in shock at the scale of the outage, which has not been seen since the Icelandic ash cloud of 2010, as they tried to estimate the cost and breadth of the repercussions caused by a fire at a nearby electrical substation that knocked out the airport’s power supply and its back-up power.
The chaos delivered a vivid demonstration of the vulnerability of critical infrastructure at a time when security has risen to the top of the European agenda.
Heathrow processes around 1,300 flights a day, according to Eurocontrol. The blaze, which was reported just after 11pm, on Thursday (Mar 20) (Friday, 7am, Singapore time), forced planes to divert to airports across Britain and Europe, while many long-haul flights simply returned to their point of departure.
The cost of the impact could total around £20 million (S$26 million) a day, said Paul Charles, a travel consultant, with no guarantee that Heathrow will reopen on Saturday given the vulnerability of the airport’s power supply.
“A back-up should be failsafe in the event of the core system being affected. Heathrow is such a vital piece of the UK’s infrastructure that it should have failsafe systems,” Charles told Reuters.
Energy Minister Ed Miliband said the fire had prevented the power back-up system from working and that engineers were working to deploy a third back-up mechanism, adding the government was working to understand “what, if any, lessons it has for our infrastructure”.
