Decision to shut Heathrow wasn’t difficult’, says CEO

A quarter of a million passengers who were due to fly to, from or via Heathrow on Friday and over the weekend saw their travel plans wrecked.

- SIMON CALDER

They now want answers about why, exactly, the airport closed for nearly 24 hours. Heathrow has launched a review by an independent board member, former transport secretary Ruth Kelly.

The airport chair, Conservative peer Paul Deighton, said: “The Kelly review will analyse all of the relevant material concerning the robustness and execution of Heathrow’s crisis management plans, the airport’s response during the incident, and how the airport recovered the operation, with the objective of identifying any improvements that could be made to our future resilience.”

In other words: could we do better next time? But the government insists such a shutdown “should be prevented from ever happening again”. The energy secretary, Ed Miliband, has commissioned the independent National Energy System Operator (Neso) “to urgently investigate the power outage incident” and “the UK’s energy resilience more broadly”.

The airport told airlines and passengers that no flights would operate on Friday, though towards the end of the day 10 departures were permitted.

Thomas Woldbye, Heathrow’s chief executive, has come under attack for the airport’s handling of the incident. The chief executive of National Grid, John Pettigrew, told the Financial Times on Sunday that the airport could have kept going.