Lakshmi sh 
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Both the international and local travelers were hugely stunned by an unforeseen fire at the electrical substation in Hayes. To secure the people from the worst situation the airport administration closed the airport for over 18-hours. This disruption further worsened with the cancellation of 1,300 flights; it ruined the routine of movement of flights & left around 200,000 passengers stranded. Though the CEO expressed his regret and apologised to the people for the discomfort, the UK parliament decided to question him and the whole incident on 2 April 2025.
Despite the emergency efforts taken by the Heathrow Airport to restore electricity, all those outages in the systems of the airport needed to be rebooted systematically. The Airport officials defended the decision to turn down all the operations for the sake of safety of passengers and employees.
Thomas Woldbye, CEO of Heathrow Airport came and explained the decisions & actions of the officials by appearing before the parliamentary committee regarding the crisis.
“It became quite clear we could not operate the airport safely quite early in this process, and that is why we closed the Airport. If we had not done that, we would have had thousands of passengers stranded at the airport at high-risk to personal injury, gridlocked roads around the airport, because don’t forget that 65,000 houses and other institutions were powered down.” – Thomas Woldbye, CEO, Heathrow Airport
But he was scrutinized with the counter questions levied by the lawmakers, that they should have received prior warnings before such a huge power supply vulnerability. They added that it showcases their failure in acting proactively during the systematic collapse. Previously, the same airport witnessed the theft of cable affecting the critical systems but yet no significant efforts or preventive measures had been taken.
As the whole world’s attention is turned towards this incident and the live scrutiny broadcasting, the UK’s travel infrastructure remains a key issue in the global stage.
