Airlines warned Heathrow of feeding days before closing

Heathrow airport was warned of “resilience” of its power supply in the days preceding a fire that closed the airport for more than a day.

The boss of a group representing airlines told a group of deputies he spoke in Heathrow on March 15 on March 19 on March 19 on Wednesday.

The boss of the Heathrow airline committee, Nigel Wicking said that he had raised “wire and cable theft around part of the power supply” which, according to him, temporarily eliminated track fires, which are essential to passenger safety,

Heathrow boss Thomas Woldbye apologized to nearly 300,000 passengers whose trips were disrupted by closure on March 21.

He offered his “deepest regrets” adding that “the situation was unprecedented”. The airport was arrested after a fire in an electrical substation.

Addressing the deputies in the transport committee, Mr. Wicking said that the temporary failure of track fires that he noticed before the fire “obviously concerned me, and as such, I had raised the point”.

“I wanted to better understand the overall resilience of the airport.”

He added: “It is the most expensive airport in the world, with regard to passenger costs, therefore from our point of view, it means that we should actually have the best service, we should have the best infrastructure.”

He said that he spoke to the director of the Heathrow team on March 15 of his concerns – six days before the fire – and the chief of the operations and chief of the customers on March 19 – two days before the fire.

On the day of closure, airlines had to divert 120 planes, which is “not a light decision to take in any context,” he added.

Consequently, when Mr. Wicking joined a call with Nats, the National Air Traffic Service, at 05:30 am, “they lacked space in the United Kingdom so that the planes stand out”.

“The planes then went to Europe, then some were even halfway from Europe and returned to the base in India,” he said. “So, a whole level of disturbance for these passengers, not to mention all the cancellations”.

Woldbye said Heathrow realized “during the early hours” on Friday March 21 that “we lost energy at the airport”.

“In our operations center, you saw all the red lights, which the systems moved,” he said. “We had no information to know why.”

“We then had a stage of the stage slightly later from the fire service that the substation was on fire,” he said.

Heathrow is provided by three substations, but eliminating one caused the airport closure.

Woldbye said that a third of the airport was moving and that Terminal 2 was particularly affected, as well as certain central systems. He added that he had become “above all a security situation”.

“We have to make sure that when one crisis occurs, people are safe,” he said.

The first priority was to check that no one was taken in elevators or was injured.

Critical security systems such as the track, the lighting of the pillars and the control tower “intervened as they should,” he said.

When asked why the airport had not reopened earlier, Woldbye said it could have mean that the passengers had been injured.

He said: “If we were wrong, we could be seated here today to have a very different discussion on the reasons why people have injured themselves, and I think it would have been a much more serious discussion.

“So there is a margin in which our people must make very serious security decisions, and that is why they are trained, that is what they do, and this requires that each system is operational, tested and safe.”

However, Mr. Wicking said Terminal 5 could have reopened earlier.

He said: “In terms of T5, my understanding of both British Airways but also the day, was that almost everything was good to work in the middle of the morning, at 10 am.”