Heathrow Airport warned about power ‘resilience’ concerns days before outage

Members of Parliament in the UK have been grilling representatives from companies involved in the response to a power outage at London-Heathrow Airport (LHR) that resulted in flight operations grinding to a standstill.    

Among the representatives appearing in front of the Transport Select Committee on April 2, 2025, was Thomas Woldbye, the Chief Executive of Heathrow Airport, who began the session by apologizing for the disruption and the “considerable inconvenience and concern it caused”. 

During the hearing Nigel Wicking, Chief Executive of Heathrow Airline Operators’ Committee, said he had voiced concerns about the airport’s power resilience days before the power outage.  

“I had warned Heathrow about concerns we had in regard to the substations. My concern was resilience,” Wicking said. 

Wicking said that he spoke to the Team Heathrow director on March 15, 2024, and the chief operating officer on March 13, 2025, about his worries.  

London Fire Brigade“It was following a couple of incidents of theft of wire and cable around some of the power supply that on one occasion took out the lights on the runway for a period of time. That obviously made me concerned and as such I had raised the point that I wanted to understand better the overall resilience of the airport,” added Wicking. 

Woldbye told the committee that safety was at the forefront of the airport’s approach to the closure and that it would be unthinkable to let passengers travel from the airport if their well-being could not be guaranteed. 

Woldbye defended the amount of time the airport was closed with concerns that the Hyde substation was still ablaze at 06:00 on March 21, 2025, and that rerouting to two alternative substations for power would take several hours. 

Woldbye said they tried to make use of the additional substations as quickly as possible but rewiring the airport involved “powering down thousands of systems” and gearing them back up again.  

Woldbye said the Kelly Review will look to determine whether in the future Heathrow could adopt procedures to access alternative power sources more rapidly.  

Nigel Wicking also said he felt that the “10 hours” needed to reestablish power was too long and the decision to begin the process was taken too late. 

Wicking, who spoke on behalf of airlines operating at Heathrow, was also critical that Terminal 5 was not up and running sooner.

Woldbye told the committee that the terminal, which was not as severely affected by the power outage as other parts of the airport, was opened as soon as it was possible.

London Fire Brigade previously confirmed that the fire at the Hyde substation began at 23:23 on March 20, 2025, and Heathrow announced a few hours later that the airport would be closed until 23:59 on March 21, 2025. 

Several flights eventually began arriving at Heathrow during the evening on March 21, 2025. 

Heathrow was closed for 16 hours, leading to disruption for thousands of passengers around the world following the fire at a nearby substation which cut power to the airport.

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