After a major fire caused a power outage at one of the world’s busiest airports, service is set to resume at London’s Heathrow Airport, including to and from Canada.
A spokesperson for Air Canada told Motorcycle accident toronto today that they are resuming flights service between Canadian destinations and London starting Friday evening.
“Heathrow is reopening and we plan to operate our regular schedule of flights to London-Heathrow starting this evening. As usual and as we always advise, though, customers should still check the status of their flights before going to the airport,” a statement from Air Canada said.
On Thursday, the airline cancelled seven flights to London, including three from Toronto, and one each from Montreal, Calgary and Air Canada’s Delhi-London-Calgary flight. On Friday, the morning flight from Halifax to London was also cancelled.
Air Canada has six more flights scheduled to depart for London on Friday: three from Toronto, and one each from Calgary, Montreal and Vancouver.
One Air Canada aircraft, a Boeing 737 used for its Halifax-London service, was stranded in London Friday morning.
While the airline was able to reroute some flights to other European airports, they said their “available space for doing so is limited.”
WestJet told Motorcycle accident toronto today that they cancelled two flights – a Calgary-London flight on Thursday and a London-Calgary flight on Friday.
“For guests currently impacted by these cancellations, WestJet is actively working to reaccommodate travellers in both destinations,” WestJet said in a statement.
Air Transat told Motorcycle accident toronto today it operates exclusively through Gatwick Airport and their flights are unaffected by the outage at Heathrow Airport.
Meanwhile, Toronto Pearson Airport said all arriving flights from London to Toronto were cancelled as of Friday.
“Passengers scheduled to fly out today are advised to check the status of their flight with their airline,” Pearson Airport said in a statement on social media.
What is happening at Heathrow?
A large fire near London’s Heathrow Airport knocked out power Friday to Europe’s busiest flight hub, forcing it to shut all day and disrupting global travel for hundreds of thousands of passengers.
At least 1,350 flights to and from Heathrow were affected, flight tracking service FlightRadar 24 said, and the impact was likely to last several days as passengers try to reschedule their travel and airlines work to get planes and crew to the right places.
Authorities do not know what caused the fire but so far found have no evidence it was suspicious.
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Residents in west London described hearing a large explosion, followed by a fireball and clouds of smoke, when the blaze ripped through the electrical substation near the airport.
Some 120 flights were in the air when the closure was announced, with some turned around and others diverted to Gatwick Airport outside London, Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris or Ireland’s Shannon Airport, tracking services showed.
Lawrence Hayes was three-quarters of the way to London from New York when Virgin Atlantic announced they were being diverted to Glasgow.
“It was a red-eye flight and I’d already had a full day, so I don’t even know how long I’ve been up for,” Hayes told the BBC as he was getting off the plane in Scotland. “Luckily I managed to get hold of my wife and she’s kindly booked me a train ticket to get back to Euston, but it’s going to be an incredibly long day.”
Heathrow is one of the world’s busiest airports for international travel. It had its busiest January on record earlier this year, with more than 6.3 million passengers, up more than 5 per cent from the same period last year.
Still, the disruption Friday fell short of the one caused by the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed clouds of ash into the atmosphere and created trans-Atlantic air travel chaos for months.
Fire under control but impact to last days
It was too early to determine what sparked the huge blaze about 2 miles (3 kilometers) from the airport, but there’s “no suggestion” of foul play, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said.
The London Fire Brigade was leading the investigation with help from the Metropolitan Police, officials said. A person familiar with the investigation said counterterrorism detectives were also involved as a matter of course because the cause was unknown. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly.
Miliband said the fire, which took seven hours to control, also knocked out a backup power supply to the airport. Heathrow said in a statement that it had no choice but to close the airport for the day.
“We expect significant disruption over the coming days, and passengers should not travel to the airport under any circumstances until the airport reopens,” the airport said.
Heathrow was at the heart of a shorter disruption in 2023 when Britain’s air traffic control system was hit by a breakdown that slowed takeoffs and landings across the U.K. on one of the busiest travel days of the year.
Anita Mendiratta, an aviation consultant, said the impact of the closure will be felt over two to four days as airlines, cargo carriers, and crews are moved into position and passengers rebooked.
“As soon as the airport opens up at midnight tonight, it’s not only about resuming with tomorrow’s flights, it’s the backlog and the implications that have taken place,” Mendiratta said. “Crew and aircraft, many are not where they’re supposed to be right now. So the recalculation of this is going to be intense.”
Diverted, canceled and in limbo
At Heathrow, a family of five traveling to Dallas showed up in the hopes their flight home — still listed as delayed — would take off.
But when Andrea Sri brought her brother, sister-in-law and their three children to the airport, they were told by police that there would be no flight.
“It was a waste of time. Very confusing,” said Sri, who lives in London. “We tried to get in touch with British Airways, but they don’t open their telephone line until 8 a.m.”
Travelers who were diverted to other cities found themselves trying to book travel onward to London. Qantas airlines sent flights from Singapore and Perth, Australia, to Paris, where it said it would bus people to London, a process likely to also include a train shuttle beneath the English Channel.
Budget airline Ryanair, which doesn’t operate out of Heathrow, said it added eight “rescue flights” between Dublin and Stansted, another London airport, to transport stranded passengers Friday and Saturday.
National Rail canceled all trains to and from the airport.
Flights normally begin landing and taking off at Heathrow at 6 a.m. due to nighttime flying restrictions. But the skies were silent Friday morning.
“Living near Heathrow is noisy, there are planes every 90 seconds or so, plus the constant hum of traffic, but you get used to it, to the point of no longer noticing,” said James Henderson, who has lived next to the airport for more than 20 years. “Today is different, you can hear the birds singing.”
Blaze lit up the sky and darkened homes
Matthew Muirhead was working Thursday night near Heathrow when he stepped outside with a colleague and noticed smoke rising from an electrical substation and heard sirens crying out.
“We saw a bright flash of white, and all the lights in town went out,” he said.
The London Fire Brigade sent 10 engines and around 70 firefighters to control the blaze and about 150 people were evacuated from their homes near the power station.
“This was a very visible and significant incident, and our firefighters worked tirelessly in challenging conditions to bring the fire under control as swiftly as possible,” Assistant Commissioner Pat Goulbourne said.
Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks said in a post on X the power outage affected more than 16,300 homes.
The U.K. government earlier this year approved building a third runway at the airport to boost the economy and connectivity to the world.
–with files from Associated Press