Heathrow shutdown raises concerns over contingency planning

By Joanna Plucinska

LONDON (Reuters) - 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.

Heathrow processes around 1,300 flights a day, according to Eurocontrol. The blaze, which was reported just after 11 p.m. (2300 GMT) on Thursday, 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 pounds ($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".

The closure is set to have days-long knock-on effects globally, leaving airline passengers stranded.

Airlines' carefully choreographed networks depend on airplanes and crews being in specific locations at specific times. Dozens of air carriers will have to hurriedly reconfigure their networks to move planes and crews around.

BACK-UP POWER?

"Even if the airport opens hopefully by the end of Friday, there will be impact running on several days because once aircraft are grounded somewhere away from an operation, they are stuck there with the crews operating the flights, and of course the customers, until those crews have been out to have the legally required rest periods," independent air transport consultant John Strickland said.

"And if the planes are not back, they can't do the follow-on flights, which means that we get cancellations in the days ahead."

Even a few minutes of delay can throw off the day's entire schedule and cause delays in other parts of the flight system.

In this case, experts are asking how Heathrow did not have more back-up power units that could be brought on site to restart electricity more quickly.

"I can't remember a piece of critical infrastructure being wholly shut down for at least a day because of a fire. I can't think of anything comparable," Tony Cox, an international risk management consultant, said.

This is not the first aviation sector outage in Britain that has raised concern across the industry and in the political sphere.

An outage of Britain's air traffic control system NATS in 2023 cost over 100 million pounds ($129 million), according to an independent review by Britain's Civil Aviation Authority, raising concerns about the stability of the system.

The Heathrow outage, especially if it drags on past Friday, is likely to raise similar alarms and lead to extensive public scrutiny, especially given that under consumer rights law, customers impacted will not be able to seek compensation from airlines as the delays are not their fault.

"Who actually picks up the bill ... remains to be seen because it will be a complex discussion and a heavy discussion certainly between the airport, the airlines, the electricity providers, insurance companies, of course, nobody will want to accept responsibility if it's possible not to," Strickland added.

($1 = 0.7730 pounds)

(Reporting by Joanna Plucinska and Andrew MacAskill in London, Dan Catchpole in Seattle, Tim Hepher in Paris; Editing by Alison Williams)