Heathrow boss ‘frustrated’ for being asleep during fire

Heathrow’s boss has mentioned it was “irritating” he slept by way of quite a few emergency telephone calls following a fireplace in March that led the airport’s closure and the cancellation of 1,300 flights.In his first media interview since a blaze at a close-by electrical substation disrupted flights for 270,000 passengers, Thomas Woldbye mentioned it wasn’t usually the best way he acted.”It isn’t how I usually function however on an operational degree all the suitable issues occurred,” he instructed the BBC’s Immediately programme.Mr Woldbye admitted that the facility outage would value “hundreds of thousands” however declined to specify how a lot.Outcomes from Heathrow revealed that pre-tax revenue fell by 37.2% to £203m within the first six months of 2025. A evaluation into the incident by former Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly discovered that Mr Woldbye missed two emergency notifications and “a number of” telephone calls on the night time of the hearth and the following energy outage as a result of his cell phone had gone into “silent mode”.Within the early hours of 21 March, Heathrow took the choice to cease operations on the airport. Mr Woldbye turned conscious of what had occurred at round 6:45am. He instructed the BBC he was happy with the disaster administration procedures that have been in place and went into motion whereas he was sleeping.”In fact, an organisation like ours has to have the ability to handle whether or not the captain’s on the bridge or not and on this specific case we took the suitable choices,” he mentioned. An investigation into how the hearth began at {an electrical} substation which equipped energy to Heathrow found that it was the results of a recognized fault on the website. Nationwide Grid, which owns the substation, had been conscious of an issue since 2018 however failed to repair it.Because the outcomes of the investigation have been printed, Heathrow mentioned it was contemplating authorized motion towards Nationwide Grid.