London: London's Heathrow Airport reopened after 18 hours, it was closed due to power cut

Due to a fire in an electrical substation, power was lost at London's busiest airport, after which the movement of aircraft was completely stopped. At the same time, the first plane landed at Heathrow Airport after about 18 hours late on Friday night. It is Europe's busiest air travel hub.

Global travel of thousands of passengers disrupted

After Heathrow withdrew its closure order, a British Airways jet landed just before sunset, disrupting the global travel of hundreds of thousands of passengers.

Flight tracking service Flightradar24 said at least 1,350 flights to and from Heathrow were affected, and the impact is likely to last for several days. Passengers are trying to reschedule their travel and airlines are working to redeploy aircraft and crews.

Hotel fares in Heathrow and surrounding cities increased

21-year-old Beau Maher from Iowa (USA) said, "Initially everything seemed exciting but within a few hours it became extremely painful." Similarly, it is becoming difficult to transport passengers who have been stranded in other countries to their destination and to complete the legal formalities required for them.

The one day rent of hotels in Heathrow and nearby cities has increased up to five times. Heathrow management has told the passengers not to come to the airport and to stay in touch with the concerned airline company regarding their travel plans. The airport will not be able to open before midnight on Friday.

1,351 flights were to be operated from Heathrow on Friday

1,351 flights were to be operated from Heathrow Airport on Friday in which 2,91,000 passengers were to travel. Due to the sudden closure of Heathrow, all the planes coming from other countries had to be landed in other cities of Britain and airports of neighboring countries.

While dozens of long distance flights were sent back to their original destination midway. In all this exercise, lakhs of passengers had to face great difficulty and airline companies have suffered losses of lakhs of crores.

Fear of huge losses like 2010

Airline experts say that earlier in 2010, due to the eruption of many volcanoes one after the other in Iceland, the sky was covered in fog and about one lakh flights had to be cancelled.
The air traffic business may have to suffer losses worth crores of pounds (lakhs of crores of rupees) due to the halt in traffic from Heathrow.
These experts say that the management of a big airport like Heathrow is expected to have sufficient electricity for an emergency but everything came to a standstill in a few hours.