London, United Kingdom:
Heathrow Airport is “fully operational”, a spokesperson said on Saturday, a day after a fire at a power station shut down Europe’s busiest air hub and caused travel mayhem.
The electricity substation blaze closed the London airport for most of Friday before some flights began to arrive and take-off later in the evening.
“We can confirm that Heathrow is open and fully operational today,” the spokesperson said on Saturday morning.
“Teams across the airport continue to do everything they can to support passengers impacted by yesterday’s outage at an off-airport power substation.”
About 1,350 flights were affected by Friday’s closure, according to the Flightradar24 tracking website.
Delays and cancellations were expected on Saturday as services resume.
“We have hundreds of additional colleagues on hand in our terminals and we have added flights to today’s schedule to facilitate an extra 10,000 passengers travelling through the airport,” the spokesperson said.
“Passengers travelling today should check with their airline for the latest information regarding their flight.”
British Airways said it expected to operate around 85 percent of its scheduled flights at the airport throughout the day.
Restrictions on overnight flights have also been temporarily lifted to help ease congestion, according to the UK’s transport department.
Around 230,000 passengers use Heathrow every day — 83 million a year — making it one of the world’s busiest airports. Planes from Heathrow serve around 80 countries.
The scale of the disruption raised questions about the vulnerability of one of the UK’s critical pieces of travel infrastructure.
Fire officials said the fire, which broke out on Thursday night, was “believed to be non-suspicious” and that an investigation would “focus on the electrical distribution equipment”.
Earlier, London’s Metropolitan Police said the force’s Counter Terrorism Command was leading the investigation into the fire given its impact, but that there was “currently no indication of foul play”.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)