Was there a governance failure as well as a power failure at Heathrow Airport?

Friday’s shutdown of Heathrow, the world’s fifth busiest airport, was the largest interruption to international aviation since the Icelandic ash cloud of 2010. More than 1,300 flights were grounded and more than 200,000 passengers were stranded worldwide.  Locally, 67,000 homes lost power for several hours and 150 homes were evacuated.

What happened?

How did the crisis break? Residents in west London described hearing a large explosion and then seeing a fireball and clouds of smoke above National Grid’s North Hyde substation, situated about 2 miles from Heathrow Airport. At 11:23pm on Friday night, the London Fire Brigade responded to a fire at the substation. 25,000 litres of cooling fluid had caught fire at the largest of three electrical substations which supply Heathrow.  A major incident was declared by the Metropolitan Police just after midnight. The CEO of Heathrow Airport, Thomas Woldbye, was rushed to the airport to take command. Following an initial analysis that this was a serious incident, the senior leadership was split into two “gold commands”, one led by the CEO and the other by the Chief Operating Officer of Heathrow Airport, Javier Echave, following crisis protocols. At around 12.30am it was decided that Woldbye’s team would go home to rest, and that the COO would take the pending decision whether to close the airport, with the CEO returning at 9am to take the decision of when to reopen.

The stranded passengers found themselves in very different positions from each other, some were well looked after by their carriers, being called immediately with details of the accommodation and transport which had been arranged for them, others were left to fend for themselves. One of the worst places to be on Friday morning was Heathrow itself where passengers were at the mercy of local hotels, guesthouses and taxi drivers, because the Airport made the decision to entirely close forcing travellers into a hectic search for local accommodation.

Has this happened before?

The incident at Heathrow follows a similar incident which took place at Manchester Airport (the UK’s largest regional airport) in June 2024, in which a power outage disabled security and baggage handling equipment. This prevented flights taking off from terminals 1 and 2 and caused the diversion of inbound planes, due to lack of space to park the arriving aircraft. An estimated 90,000 passengers were affected.

In August 2023, an outage of Britain’s air traffic control system NATS cost over £100 million, and more than 700,000 passengers suffered cancellations and delays 

Whilst power failures are rare, entire airport shutdowns are almost unknown. The last time an entire airport was shut down due to power failure was in 2017, when Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta, the world’s busiest airport, suffered power loss for 11 hours, causing the cancellation of over 1500 flights.

Was the shutdown avoidable?

Since Friday, the press and public have been asking the question: how could a single fire shut Europe's busiest airport? Whilst power was restored to 62,000 of the 67,000 households affected in under 7 hours (by 6am) it took Heathrow at least 16 hours (by 4pm) to begin reopening the airport, and about 24 hours for normal service to resume for passengers.

How did the failure of a single substation cause the closure of the world’s fifth largest airport? Business leaders, politicians and public alike have expressed surprise that Heathrow Airport took the decision to entirely close on Friday morning, and that it remained closed for nearly a full day. Peter Swabey,  Policy & Research Director at The Chartered Governance Institute UK & Ireland, commented:

“That a fire at a single substation can close a major airport for a day is a matter of concern. The investigations which have been announced will need to work hard to provide answers and restore public confidence in the UK’s infrastructure and crisis response. Additionally, the way many passengers were treated on Friday leaves much to be desired; too many were simply stranded with no support. The UK needs to get better at handling crises.”

The CEO of Heathrow Airport, Thomas Woldbye, has attempted to explain the Airport’s position:

“Our back-up systems are safety systems which allow us to land aircraft and evacuate passengers safely, but they are not designed to allow us to run a full operation. As the busiest airport in Europe, Heathrow uses as much energy as a small city, therefore it’s not possible to have backup for all of the energy we need to run our operation safely.”

Woldbye went on to say that these remaining grid supply points were capable of powering Heathrow, but only after a complex switching process, taking several hours.  This involved closing down hundreds of systems which used electricity, switching the supply then restarting and testing everything from escalators to aircraft fuelling systems - which took most of Friday to achieve.

“That’s how most airports operate,” said Woldbye, who maintained that “the same would happen in other airports”

Woldbye said Heathrow uses as much power as a city and would need to install an expensive standalone generator to absolutely guarantee no power outages.

This explanation creates a rather bespoke definition of “backup”, the customary explanation of which is: “able to act as a substitute or alternative”.

In comments first reported by the Financial Times, John Pettigrew, CEO of National Grid has challenged Heathrow’s decision to close the airport. Pettigrew told the Financial Times that: “There was no lack of capacity from the substations…each substation individually can provide enough power to Heathrow.”

The Director General of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), Willie Walsh, has weighed in, say that this is ‘yet another case of Heathrow letting down both travellers and airlines’.

Woldbye’s approach was clearly to point the finger at National Grid as much as possible, telling the BBC: “The situation was not created at Heathrow airport, it was created outside the airport and we had to deal with the consequences.”

The background to this public dispute is that passenger reimbursement is a sensitive issue in the airline industry, and a substantial reimbursement bill has been accumulating since Friday. Since 2004, passengers travelling with a UK or EU-based airline, or flying from a UK or EU airport are entitled to receive substantial compensation for delayed flights, and its is the airlines which carry the responsibility under law for passenger reimbursement. Most of the costs of Heathrow’s closure on Friday will not fall on Heathrow but rather on airlines, who will try to pass off as much of the cost as possible to their insurance firms. Legal action is likely because the rules for how this bill gets divided up are far from clear. Willie Walsh has criticised the current system claiming that “Heathrow has very little incentive to improve” because it is airlines, not airports, which pay the cost of looking after disrupted passengers.

What questions will the investigations try to answer?

Two investigations have been launched. On Saturday, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband asked the National Energy System Operator (NESO), which oversees U.K. gas and electricity networks, to “urgently investigate” the fire, “to understand any wider lessons to be learned on energy resilience for critical national infrastructure.” NESO is expected to report initial findings within six weeks.

Also on Saturday, Heathrow announced its own review, to be led by former transport secretary Ruth Kelly, a member of the airport's board. Heathrow Chairman Paul Deighton said Ruth Kelly will look at “the robustness and execution of Heathrow’s crisis management plans, the airport’s response during the incident and how the airport recovered.”

Questions the internal investigations will need to answer include:

• Was Heathrow’s business continuity plan (BCP) followed during the incident? Does any part of the BCP need revising?
• Why did it take Heathrow Airport so long to switch its power supply from the failed generator to the alternative generators to which Heathrow has access?
• Why was the backup diesel generator not able to power the Airport during the switchover?
• Was the decision to entirely close the Airport necessary?
• Was Heathrow opened as soon as possible?
• When did Heathrow conduct its last crisis simulation exercise? Did this exercise include generator failure? And were the findings incorporated into Heathrow’s BCP?

The NESO review will need to cover the following:

• What was the cause of the substation fire?
• Why are automatic fire suppression systems not installed at critical infrastructure like substations?
• Should major airports be required to upgrade their standalone generators to prevent this sort of incident recurring? If so, who should pay for this? Or is the cost out of proportion to the risk?
• Did Heathrow declare the risk of substation failure to the regulator and admit that it would involve the airport shutting down? Did the regulator sign this risk off? Were the Department of Transport and the Department of Energy Security aware of this risk?
• How many other UK airports are in the same situation?
• Should major airports be required to conform to higher standards than smaller airports?

What other reviews are required?

National Grid plc has not yet announced an internal review, and the Government seems content with a single review led by NESO, focussed on electrical resilience. Neither of the reviews announced to date is capable of addressing the structural problem with the airline industry, in which whilst the costs of upgrading energy supply fall on the airport, the costs of energy failure fall mostly on the airlines. Until this structural problem is resolved, airport closure will continue to be a possibility.

How can board members ensure that they are prepared for crisis?

Risk management is a proactive process focused on preventing or reducing the likelihood of harm from internal and external risks. All directors should receive formal training in risk to ensure that their organisations are preventing as many crises as possible and are preparing for those risks which cannot be avoided. The Chartered Governance Institute UK & Ireland has developed a specialised training programme in risk governance for directors and governance professionals:

Risk Governance and Leadership Masterclass

The Institute has also developed two training programmes specially to provide directors and governance professionals with the general skills they require to contribute to highly performing boards:

Directors and their Duties

Non-Executive Directors' Programme

Alternatively, in-house training and/or coaching is available; please email Tara Wilson on twilson@cgi.org.uk to discuss your requirements.