The boss of Heathrow today insisted the “right decisions were taken by the right people” during the dramatic shutdown of the airport in March caused by an electricity substation fire.
It emerged in a May report into the devastating power outage that CEO Thomas Woldbye slept through the early stages of the drama despite two emergency notification calls and “several” phone calls from Heathrow’s chief operating officer, Javier Echave, in the early hours of the morning. He has since expressed his “deep regret” at being uncontactable.
Today Woldbye, who was announcing solid first half financial results from the west London hub, said that he could have been out of contact for other reasons but the company had resilient procedures “and the right decisions were taken.”
The blaze at the North Hyde sub-station forced the closure of the airport for an entire day disrupting nearly 1,400 flights and the plans of more than 200,000 passengers.
Woldbye said the loss and revenue and costs would amount to low double digit millions of pounds and said Heathrow was still considering taking legal action again National Grid. The network operator was blamed in a separate report last month.
It found that the fire was caused by a problem with moisture entering key components at the substation, a fault that National Grid had known about since 2018 but not fixed.
Woldbye said that a substation fire on the same scale today “would still affect airport operations” but he hoped any closures would be on a smaller scale and for a shorter period of time.
Heathrow revealed that revenue in the six months to June were up by 1.9% to £1.724 billion while EBITDA profits were 0.8% higher at £959 million. The number of passengers passing through the airport rose 0.3% to 39.9 million. The airport expects to handle around 84 million over the year as a whole but is very close to its current capacity.
Heathrow bosses will submit proposal for a third runway to ministers by July 31st. Heathrow said: “Depending on the Government's response, we would aim to meet their ambition to secure planning permission in this Parliament and for the runway to be operational by 2035.”
