Distressed and seething....we're a laughing stock again

The Heathrow shutdown was manic. Any more of this and I will start a line of travel chaos T-shirts, writes Simon Calder

- Simon Calder

Each of the quarter-million passengers whose travel plans were wrecked by the sudden closure of Heathrow airport on Friday simply wanted to reach the destination on their ticket. There was no good way to learn that wasn't going to happen due to a fire in an electricity substation that had cut power to Europe's busiest airport.

For the 30,000 bleary passengers or so aboard overnight flights to west of central London, it was an announcement from the pilot saying the plane was diverting to some corner of a foreign airfield: possibly Reykjavik, maybe Cairo. Even worse, perhaps: that after four hours of flying towards London, a U-turn was in progress and the aircraft was returning to Delhi or New York. Back to square one.