The closure of London Heathrow Airport following an electrical substation fire is expected to result in financial losses of "hundreds of millions of pounds" to the airline industry.
Speaking to CNN, Shukor Yusof of aviation industry advisory firm Endau Analytics said the fallout from the fire would stretch into the weekend and likely early next week, causing "chaos" with flight schedules as a backlog piles up.
Upwards of 145,000 passengers could be affected by the closure, according to airline analytics firm, with more than 1,300 flights to and from Heathrow having been cancelled or diverted already.
A total of 83.9m passengers flew through Heathrow last year.
Paul Charles, head of the travel PR and trade marketing consultancy PC Agency and formerly head of communications for Virgin Atlantic, told Sky News that the closure could cost the airport and a number of major airlines around £20-30m each, or more depending on how long the outage continues.
"A one-day outage is really a three or four-day outage," he said. "Aircrafts are out of place, airline crews are out of place -- you do not get operations back to anything like normal until three of four days after this sort of incident."
Shares in IAG, which owns British Airways and Aer Lingus sank 5% earlier but are now trading down 1.5%, with Lufthansa (-1.6%) and Air France-KLM (-1.5%) also taking a hit.
The substation fire started at around 11pm on Thursday, cutting the power supply as well as breaking the back-up supply at Heathrow, Europe's busiest and the world's fifth busiest airport.
No European airport has seen disruption on such a large scale since the 2010 Icelandic ash cloud grounded around 100,000 flights at an estimated cost of £280m per day to Heathrow and businesses operating out of the airport.
“Heathrow is experiencing a significant power outage across the airport due to a large fire at a nearby electrical substation. Whilst fire crews are responding to the incident, we do not have clarity on when power may be reliably restored," Heathrow said in a statement.
“To maintain the safety of our passengers and colleagues, we have no choice but to close Heathrow until 23h59 on 21 March 2025. We expect significant disruption over the coming days and passengers should not travel to the airport under any circumstances until the airport reopens.
“We will provide an update when more information on the resumption of operations is available. We know this will be disappointing for passengers and we want to reassure you that we are working as hard as possible to resolve the situation.”
(Pic: Dukas/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
