Heathrow warned about power supply resilience, MPs told

(Sharecast News) - Heathrow was warned about power supply concerns less than a week before an outage shut the airport, causing chaos for thousands of passengers, MPs were told on Wednesday. A fire at a local substation caused a major power cut to the UK's busiest airport on 21 March. More than 1,300 flights were cancelled, and the airport was unable to fully reopen for more than 24 hours.

But appearing before the transport select committee on Wednesday, the chief executive of the Heathrow Airline Operators' Committee said he had raised concerns about power supply resilience on 15 March, six days before the outage.

Nigel Wicking told the politicians: "I'd actually warned Heathrow of concerns that we had with regard to the substations and my concern was resilience.

"It was following of 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."

In response, Heathrow chief executive Thomas Woldbye said the incident was "unprecedented".

He acknowledged the "considerable concern and inconvenience" closing the airport caused, but insisted there was no other option.

However, he said the airport would review if some terminals could have reopened more quickly. "I am absolutely committed to making sure we learn from this," he told MPs.

National Grid confirmed power was available from two other substations. But it took Heathrow's engineers around 10 hours to reconfigure the power supply.

Appearing alongside Woldbye and Wicking in front of the committee were Alice Delahunty, president of UK electricity transmissions at National Grid, and Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks' Eliane Algaard.

The committee is investigating if Heathrow could have dealt with the power cut differently, including whether alternative power sources could have been used earlier.

The Heathrow AOC represents around 90 airlines.