It's not the first time a major airport is down because of power failure, and other airports are working to address this type of vulnerability.
> The power vulnerability for airports was never made more obvious and painful than in Atlanta seven years ago. An underground electrical system fire in late 2017 damaged two substations and caused a complete outage lasting nearly 12 hours at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport
Heathrow's power outage is much worse than Atlanta's, this is really bad. Allow me to make my point:
1. UK’s has one major airport to get out of the country—Heathrow. Gatwick and that lot don’t carry the same weight. When Heathrow goes down, you’re proper stuck. Atlanta has DC, Miami right there.
2. UK allows transit visas, so half the people transiting can’t even step out the terminal, what do they do when the airport is closed?
The US doesn’t allow that, everyone clears customs/passport control, so no ‘no man’s land’ limbo for stranded passengers.
3. Heathrow's outage is going to take 24 hours as of right now. That's twice Atlanta
Both Gatwick [0] and Stansted are busier than either Washington airport [1], and if you're considering Miami as an alternative to Atlanta then why not similarly ridiculous options like Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin for passengers stuck in Heathrow?
Miami and DC aren't even close to the nearest major airport cities to Atlanta. Charlotte and Orlando are many hours closer and busier [1] in terms of commercial passengers (though still not as convenient as the UK's comparable airports).
Only about a quarter of Heathrow passengers are transiting [2] and a significant portion of those are citizens of the US, EU, UK and other countries who don't need a visa. Maybe 10% of passengers are stuck in limbo, not half of them.
Hi dang, did you extend their comments' "editability" or is it already a feature I have been missing all along? I mean ability to edit/delete after a certain time (I guess it's a few hours right now?).
Ye, I've been travelling on it since the first week it opened. But if you were redirected and had to fend for yourself you would need to book ahead on a tunnel or boat, hire a car to drive from France to Coquelles - find somewhere to drop the car, hire another car in the UK. All assuming you land in Paris in the morning early enough to do all this.
Yes, all of which could be done in hours less time than it would take to get from Atlanta to any comparable airport.
Consider the amount of train/ferry transit between London and Paris. That doesn't exist in the US. Rental car companies don't keep that much extra stock on hand, and really do not love renting cars for inter-state one-way journeys.
I categorically reject that getting from Atlanta to London with ATL nonoperational would be either faster or easier than getting from London to Atlanta with LHR nonoperational.
That I use regularly to actually drive from no-too-far from LHR to Paris and back. It's a thing I actually do.
And I can tell you, it might be theoretically in Google Maps land to do the journey in 6 hours, but IRL in this scenario it won't happen. Actual empirical evidence.
In theory yes, but we were specifically talking about driving. And whilst 6 hours CDG to LHR is possible in theory (and I've done it a number of times), it does depend on a whole load of other factors that are not present compared to hiring a car at US airport 1 and driving to US airport 2.
Unless you're in the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
I brought up driving to illustrate the incorrectness of the original claim, the person I replied to did not mention driving. The person you replied to is correct to bring up the EuroStar option.
By the way, the snide remarks you add to the end to each of your comments may be better suited for a place like Reddit or TruthSocial. The community standards guidelines for HN can be found at the bottom of the page.
I was replying to "It is a six hour drive from Heathrow to Paris."
I live close enough to LHR to notice the replacement of Boeing/Airbus with Cessna/Pipers from local airfields in the sky today. I also regularly drive to and/from Paris.
It is a six hour drive. But ONLY if you have your car ready, have booked a crossing ahead of time (otherwise you might want to slap another half day on those times), make no stops, you don't end up in a queue at UK customs (1 hour+ not infrequent occurrance). Don't happen to have your car sitting at CDG waiting for you? You'll have to hire one, but you'll be unlikely to be able to take that to the UK so you're then finding somewhere to drop that off and somehow cross as a foot passenger which you can't do on Le Shuttle...
Point being, cross-border travel throws up all of these hurdles which you simply don't have in the US example.
It's still "right there" overall, you can take a local flight that takes one hour.
Most importantly, you're in the same country whereas in the case of LHR closing the number of airports able to handle widebody long haulers...are essentially all in countries with different customs and visas.
The US has dozens of smaller commercial and even private airports, same for London honestly so this isn't the greatest arguement except it doesn't need to deal with customs.
At least Ireland and the UK are in one visa regime, outside of Schengen. And because there are plenty of flights between Ireland and Schengen countries, all commercial Irish airports should have passport control.
But Dublin airport has about 1/2 the gates of Heathrow...
1: It's clearly not been as disruptive as you're suggesting. Flights have been diverted to airports within a few hour's journey by bus or train, others have been cancelled, just like would happen with Atlanta.
2: I don't know if they've done it, but the UK can grant entry for a few days to affected passengers. This will be part of a contingency plan.
> 2. UK allows transit visas, so half the people transiting can’t even step out the terminal, what do they do when the airport is closed?
Airside to airside bus shuttle?
> The US doesn’t allow that, everyone clears customs/passport control, so no ‘no man’s land’ limbo for stranded passengers.
Anchorage International Airport, amongst few (less than a handful really) other US airports, have separate international section with sterilised transit.
> It's not the first time a major airport is down because of power failure, and other airports are working to address this type of vulnerability.
To be fair, I'd probably be more interested to hear what major airports are doing to avoid a reoccurance of CrowdStrike-type scenarios. Which is perhaps a more likely re-occurence than loss of substation feeds.
Seems like a national security issue if there’s a single point of failure a few miles away that can take down one of Europe’s largest airports and global air travel.
Military airports are working fine. National security doesn't rely on civilian airports. And communications networks aren't disrupted or anything. This isn't enabling terrorism.
It's absolutely a huge economic issue. Economic-political. But I'm not seeing a national security angle here.
"[...] national security is widely understood to include also non-military dimensions, such as the security from terrorism, minimization of crime, economic security, energy security, environmental security, food security, and cyber-security."
Large-scale issues that impact the economy are typically under the "national security" umbrella. It's a term that uses the broad definition of "security".
Whether this incident qualifies, I don't know, but "national security" is definitely not just about military stuff. Just like how "food security" isn't about physically protecting food from damage.
While I agree with you, this is a huge issue with the term "security" and what it means to "provide security" as a government, because at some point almost everything can be labeled as a "national security threat" if it happens to be against the political desiderata of any one controlling said governments at a certain moment in time.
I feel like this sort of "security reflex" only got worst after 9/11, it was already there before even before that point but starting with Bush jr. it cascading into lots and lots of non-military related areas.
Amusingly, some media outlets confused the Scandinavian SAS airline with Britain's SAS Special Forces unit, and reported that the special forces unit had cancelled its trips out of Heathrow :) https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/live/2025/mar/21/hayes-s...
While I agree that saying this is a big national security issue is overstating it, if an adversary can cripple you economically because you have a few single points of failure, that is a national security issue
“National security, or national defence (national defense in American English), is the security and defence of a sovereign state, including its citizens, *economy*, and institutions, which is regarded as a duty of government.”
Whether mere incompetence from those whose job it is to check such installations for failure or bad actors, other 'bad actors' will have gained a useful indication of how vulnerable Britain’s infrastructure is to attack. It's reckoned > 290K passengers have flights cancelled or diverted and ensuring chaos for days.
Most militarily-significant targets are themselves non-military.
The Russian war of aggression on Ukraine is a prime example: power infrastructure, transportation, communications, commercial hubs, healthcare, and general civilian targets of opportunity are all targeted with high frequency by Russian forces.
UK national security interests are spelled out in summary beginning on page 5 of this PDF, "Government Functional Standard: GovS 007: Security", notably
Each organisation’s governance and management framework shall cover physical, personnel, cyber, incident management, technical and industry security
As an example of non-military focus, the present US national security policy leads with ... tourist visas:
To protect Americans, the United States must be vigilant during the visa-issuance process to ensure that those aliens approved for admission into the United States do not intend to harm Americans or our national interests.
An earlier document from the Bush II White House leads with:
People everywhere want to be able to speak freely; choose who will govern them; worship as they please; educate their children—male and female; own property; and enjoy the benefits of their labor.
Originally conceived as protection against military attack, national security is widely understood to include also non-military dimensions, such as the security from terrorism, minimization of crime, economic security, energy security, environmental security, food security, and cyber-security.
> Most militarily-significant targets are themselves non-military.
Indeed. Large scale war is extremely expensive. Russia's government is spending about 40% of total tax revenue on invading Ukraine. So anything it can do to harm the economies of the people fighting it helps. Equally, this is why Ukraine has been putting so much effort into blowing up oil and gas infrastructure in Russia, their #1 source of tax revenue.
Few people actually include necessary infrastructure into their threat model and almost no one is willing to pay the cost of building effective redundancy into the system. I could probably shut down any airport in the world with a few late-night firebombs tossed into the right substation.
And no, it is not a national security issue. There are three other airports in the London region, plus RAF Norholt and RAF Kenly inside the M25 ring.
I used to live next to RAF Kenley, it's not really usable in any valuable way - it's a relic. It's for gliders only with no powered flight allowed. It has no facilities and is very uneven/roughly paved, but could probably accept landings of small planes or fighters in extremis. Biggin Hill would be used instead if you needed an airport in that immediate area.
> Heathrow is a significant part of the UK economy
Is it, really ?
From Heathrow's own website[1], so we can expect figures on the "generous" side:
"Heathrow Airport is expected to contribute approximately £4.7bn to the UK economy "
This incident started somewhere around midnight and is currently estimated to be resolved by 15:00. So let's round that up to "one day".
£4.7bn divided by 365 is £12.8m
Compared to say, the UK financial services sector which contributed £208.2bn to the UK economy in 2023[2] where an equivalent day out would cost £570m .... Heathrow's paltry £12m is equivalent to a 30 minute outage in the financial sector.
Also, to put it further into perspective - Tesco, the UK's biggest supermarket operator - had revenues of £68bn last year...[3]
Does that count only the actual airport? It doesn't count the potential business travellers contributing to the economy in different ways. Like if half of the financial sector were due to arrive at Heathrow, where would that be in the analysis?
Just to downplay the importance of Heathrow through numbers is a bit absurd.
If half the financial sector is in the plane somehow, and they decide “oh, the airport has a power outage, better crash into the ocean instead,” that might make a major difference. More likely they will go land at a different airport or delay their travel, depending on there they are in the process.
You missed the parent's point, which is that a significant fraction of people flying to London because they have business to do in London, and the value of their time is not zero. If their time is wasted, that has a real cost in terms of lost productivity.
I don’t think I did miss their point. The loss is not the deletion of their productivity, it is the cost of shifting that productivity back by a day or so.
I've flown through Heathrow a dozen or so times, and have spent maybe $200 in various shops and restaurants. Outside the airport, I spent months working on projects, and both I and the projects involved much more than $200. An analysis that includes only direct spending misses the overall impact.
All right, but if Heathrow was down for a day, what would you do? Cancel the trip, and never go at all? Or would you go a day later, or through a different airport, or fly to Manchester and take the train?
Even if the airline let you, why would you travel to Manchester? That's half a day and a £100 train fare away from London. There's still Gatwick, Stansted and Luton in 'London', plus Cardiff, Birmingham and Bristol as alternatives.
If money were no object even Amsterdam Schiphol or Brussels would make for a faster journey than Manchester!
Ah, right! Here's an approximate comparison then, measuring from one of the terminus stations serving central London, according to railway timetable data:
0h 30m - Heathrow
1h 00m - Gatwick
1h 00m - Luton
1h 30m - Stansted
2h 30m - Manchester
3h 00m - Birmingham
3h 00m - Bristol
4h 00m - Cardiff
Plus Channel Tunnel trains:
2h 00m - Brussels
4h 00m - Amsterdam
Looks like I was wrong about Manchester being further than Cardiff though!!
It's very reasonable, and I wouldn't hesitate to do this if it was a business trip.
Many flights have been diverted to Manchester, partly because airlines with flights to Heathrow also have flights from Manchester, but are less likely to have flights from the other London airports.
Manchester Airport railway station is 2 minutes walk from the airport's main entrance, I think using a covered walkway, or maybe it was underground. Going to London takes 2¾ hours with one change, trains run every 20 minutes.
It would be more convenient to be diverted somewhere a bit closer, but on the scale of an intercontinental flight it's not a big deal.
> Cardiff, Birmingham and Bristol as alternatives ... even Amsterdam Schiphol or Brussels would make for a faster journey than Manchester!
Cardiff Airport to London takes 3 hours by train, Bristol Airport about 2½ hours, both are less frequent. Amsterdam is four hours by train, Brussels is around 3 hours.
Birmingham (BHX) and East Midlands (EMA) are the only airports closer to London in travel time than Manchester.
By what basis are Brussels or Amsterdam closer to London from Manchester? Manchester is a 2 hour train ride from London. Brussels is similar, but there’s at least an hour of mandatory security and waiting. Amsterdam is much further away.
Thats not really a fair comparison. Youve compared an entire industry to one entity within an industry. Id be interested to see what the numbers would be if you shutdown all commercial UK airports for a day. Still smaller I'd imagine, but at least comparable
If we're going to be pedantic about fair comparisons, then really you would need to, for example:
Remove airport duty-free sales figures since that has a negligible effect on the UK economy, but does pad up their bottom line.
Remove leisure passenger derived numbers. Because "passenger tourism contributes to the UK economy" type data are very much finger in the air subjective estimates prone to bias and massaging. For example, common scenario is relatives coming to stay. They stay at your house, you feed them at your house, their net contribution to the UK economy is effectively naff all apart from maybe a couple of museum and transport tickets.
A significant part of the economy perhaps, but 'national security threat' is a somewhat higher bar IMHO. LHR has a role of convenience, but not necessity. If JFK was shut down for a day or two and had limited operations for another week it would be inconvenient but would barely register in the national economic stats. I am on a flight heading out of Heathrow on Sunday for work travel and have booked an alternative out of Gatwick just in case. Inconvenient, but not a massive problem.
What will be telling here is how quickly things adapt to the disruption. I expect to feel more impact from the loss of power to businesses in the surrounding area that are involved in air shipment than in the flight disruptions (e.g. cold chain logistics and inventory management for just-in-time processes that warehouse near the airport.)
> What will be telling here is how quickly things adapt to the disruption.
Most people won't have to. The substation area covers 62,000 properties, but only 4,800 are actually without power as a result of the incident. In addition they are expecting restoration of power by 15:00 same-day.[1]
That link isn't working currently, and when I checked it earlier it was referring to an outage which started late yesterday night. So I'm not sure it was relevant.
> Seems like a national security issue if there’s a single point of failure
No. Its not.
Its the fact that the decades of under-investment in power distribution infrastructure is coming home to roost.
Its no secret there's little to no "fat" in the UK grid system. Hence it has difficulty coping with black-swan events such as this.
Anyone who buys datacentre space in London knows the reason prices have gone through the roof in recent years. Its becasue the grid simply cannot get the extra capacity to where it is needed. And this is before energy prices started rising due to the UK's electricity being mostly dependent on gas (previous governments having sold off gas-storage facilities to build houses on the land instead).
That's why its also a pain in the backside to build new banks of EV fast chargers anywhere in the UK. Getting the power there involves long, protracted, discussions with the grid followed by payments of large amounts of money and a written promise to the grid that you agree to load-shedding at any time if necessary.
I suspect you will find its not a single point of failure either. Its just that Hayes is a high-demand area, so see above for lack of excess capacity .... if one site goes boom, the other will struggle to take on 100% load.
> I suspect you will find its not a single point of failure either. It’s just that Hayes is a high-demand area, so see above for lack of excess capacity .... if one site goes boom, the other will struggle to take on 100% load.
Hayes (North Hyde) is a few miles NE of Heathrow, but Laleham (similar sized) is only a few miles South - I’d would have assumed both served as fully redundant supplies for the airport, given it’s critical national infrastructure.
(The old BBC Television Centre in London had three independent supplies, I believe)
> (The old BBC Television Centre in London had three independent supplies, I believe)
There's a story, possibly apocryphal, that the UK nuclear deterrent submarines used the continued broadcast of Radio 4 as a dead-man switch to determine if nuclear war had broken out and they needed to open the safe containing their orders.
Which is to say: What counts as "critical national infrastructure" can be surprising.
Radio 4 on long wave, I believe - which is only guaranteed until the end of June this year because the BBC’s stock of irreplaceable high power valves is running out. As well as triggering Armageddon the LW signal also switched older electricity meters (phew, back on topic!) between standard daytime and cheap overnight power.
So .. why are people trying to build new datacentre space in London rather than somewhere a bit further away and less expensive? Easier to put the datacentre near the power and run some fiber rather than the other way round, surely?
The expense is unpleasant, but the money has to come from somewhere, and the user paying is easier to justify than all the other bill-payers collectively or the taxpayer.
> why are people trying to build new datacentre space in London rather than somewhere a bit further away and less expensive?
Most likely some combination of:
1. A chunk of the customer base (financial sector, hyperscalers etc.) that wants the low latency and who are price insensitive because of their deep pockets.
2. If peering matters to you, then you're limited to where the IXP is, which is usually only at the major London sites. LINX, for example, have LINX Wales, but that is not interconnected with LINX London, so you either need to get space in London or pay for fibre capacity back to London.
3. Fibre coverage outside large conurbations in the UK has traditionally been shit and to varying degrees still is.
4. The rural areas don't have substations ready-to-go and the NIMBY's come running if you propose building one or anything else in their backyards (see protests about new wind farms).
Almost certainly many more things I've missed, those are just a few off the top of my head.
There are various locations outside of Central London but within the M25 boundary. But YMMV when it comes to being any less expensive. I suspect you will find the Outer London market has "hardened" over the last few years.
Verging into cynical territory, marketing might come into it a little bit. "Telehouse London" sounds cooler in the customer presentation "Telehouse near some village you've never heard of".
The UK has a weird National Grid system whereby the cost of electricity is the same nationwide (except Scotland)
So datacenters build in London as the connection/electricity price is same as building in rural areas and they'd obviously prefer being closer to users in London.
You keep saying “No it’s not” and then describing exactly what most people would call “a single point of failure” and “a national security issue” in a lot more words.
> You keep saying “No it’s not” and then describing exactly what most people would call “a single point of failure” and “a national security issue” in a lot more words.
What are you on about ?
Its not a national security issue. Full stop. There are many other airports in the London area and elesewhere in the UK. Heathrow is a civilian airport, not a military one. 99% of air cargo to the UK does NOT come to Heathrow.
Its not a single point of failure either. Sure, for those TEMPORARILY affected it might feel that way. But businesses with contingency plannign will simply invoke their DR plans and go elsewhere ... flights will divert, people will WFH instead of going the offices, people will have to travel to a supermarket a little bit further away.
Also, regarding "single point of failure", see this website[1]... 62,000 customers affected but only 4,800 without power[1]. Not quite a SPOF then is it !
Also, you want guaranteed N+1 resilience at grid level, who do you think is going to pay for that ?
Most people would be happy with the grid sorting out its capacity issues at N level, one thing at a time my friend.
"National security site" is not a synonym for "military installation."
It means "critical infrastructure whose failure causes significant adverse effects."
The UK's main airport is absolutely that.
Your quote about 99% of air cargo not coming through Heathrow is made-up nonsense. The correct figure is closer to around 50% by volume and 70% by value.
> Heathrow carries over 50% of air freight and is a major hub.
Not denying it, but it does depend on what you're sending.
For example, if you send something by DHL, it has a significantly greater chance of going through East Midlands Airport than it does Heathrow.
Same for UPS and others. The bulk of their recent investments have been away from Heathrow.
The non-Heathrow sites have better road connections, and more importantly for air cargo, the noise abatement rules at non-Heathrow sites are more relaxed.
The other problem with Heathrow is that BA have their finger in the pies and they have too many slots, so that limits any growth on the independent freight side.
Heathrow has effectively hit its capacity limit. That may or may not change if they ever build the third runway.
Heathrow undoubtedly does the most air cargo. Sure express often comes into EMA on dedicated flights, but lots of freight comes in the hold of passenger aircraft, and that’s where Heathrow is king. The lack of passenger traffic is undoubtedly a key reason why EMA only does 1/5th of Heathrow’s air cargo, as as you have noted it’s ideally located to serve a lot of the UK.
>Heathrow is a civilian airport, not a military one.
Not saying this incident is or isn't a national security issue, but this is not really pertinent to whether an incident is classified as a national security issue.
National security encompasses much more than just military-related stuff. The "security" part of "national security" is using a broad definition of security (like "food security" isn't strictly about physically protecting food from damage).
It's all been privatized and they don't care about anything other than maintaing profits so of course we're seeing the effects now. It's also why every single water provider in the UK is dumping raw sewage into our rivers and when the government tries to make them fix it they cry about how that will eat into their profits and how it's unfair.
That is only a very recent change though, 1 October 2024[1].
Before that it was very much privatised, 1990–2024[2].
Technically in the background I suspect you will find very little has changed since October 2024 since (a) not enough time has passed (b) things like TUPE means you will end up with most of the same people doing the same things under a different logo, at least for a little while until changes get phased in.
If the entire transformer is lost, procuring replacement transformers for substations can take from several months to years. Insulation failures are relatively common in older power substations. It seems someone should have done a better job preparing disaster recovery scenarios for Heathrow.
Edit:
BBC reporting "some power" restored on a "interim basis" as the power company is now using a different substation. It would be curious if the increased effort on other substations would then cause further power failures...A bit like the postmortems of global cloud providers, where taking a node out, causes increased stress on other nodes...
One would hope the utility would have a spare transformer or two sitting around, I guess that’s not guaranteed tho. MV and HV transformers have extremely long lead times like you said.
Yes and no. The vast majority of commercial flights what would have landed at Heathrow today won't be landing at a different London airport instead. There isn't spare, redundant capacity for that. Instead the flights will be cancelled.
If by "national security issue" we mean "can the UK move military aircraft and important people" then no, Heathrow isn't key at all. There are other airbases and airports.
If we mean that a long outage would have economic impact and is hard to find the capacity elsewhere, then yes. As per grandparent post "take down one of Europe’s largest airports and global air travel".
Yeah well, not everything that annoys people and loses bussinesses money is a "national security issue", no matter how far the US overton window shifted on that matter.
What would you suggest as a backup? Supposedly they have generators/redundancy but the place requires so much power that that can only maintain critical functions (I guess ensuring incoming flights can still land and taxi in the mins after the power loss).
One potential solution is to add a connection to a second substation. For example, Laleham is a few miles south of Heathrow, and can be fed without sharing any infrastructure with North Hyde.
I doubt it's worth the additional expenses, though. Transformers exploding like this is extremely rare, and the main reason this one has such an impact is because the firefighting effort required the other two transformers to be shut down. Investing in better physical separation between the individual transformers is probably a way more effective investment.
Grid power is hard. Even with local generation failovers for air and ground safety systems, Heathrow is massive and uses a lot of power (1-2MWh/day). It's hard to route around that sort of demand.
I don't disagree that this is something that shouldn't happen, but that's what we say for almost every preventable grid failure. I think this is a national inconvenience rather than a security issue though. There are short-term alternatives which will be used.
Yeah I munched the maths but yours is 10 years old!
The 2022 version of that sustainability report puts their annual bought in electricity at 272,610 MWh, 747 MWh per day.
My wonky maths aside, it's amazing how much energy they've saved. In your link, the switch to LEDs alone saw a 20% total power reduction. I'm sure I've seen electric vehicles there so I'm surprised this number is still apparently in freefall. Perhaps they're doing more local generation (eg) PV
While we're doing wacky units for energy instead of the joule, I'd personally prefer roughly 360 DeLorean's per day (assuming the 1.21 gigawatts are required for roughly 10 seconds)
Yup I think I missed a comma when originally reading the sustainability report. They buy-in an average of 747 MWh a day (2022).
The point I was stumbling to try and make was that Heathrow is dense. Just under a GWh a day delivered to a 1200ha site isn't going to get a natural diversity of supply, especially compared to a rail system does.
[0] suggests (without a useful link and my searching has not found one) that Heathrow is doing 460GWh annually. Presumably[1] that equates to 1.25GWh daily (which could be where the 1-2MWh/day came from - a simple unit error)?
It might well be, but you don't have any proof of that. In Lithuania it took months of investigations to catch the culprits, analyze all evidence and make that statement. I can imagine in the UK it can take even more.
For Brexit - facebook and cambridge analytica got fined.... that is not UK sabotaging itself. US tools are very successful in UK because UK uses same freaking language as US does.
I wasn't talking about that at all - I was talking about bending over backwards when it comes to corporations or any kind of moneyed interests. We've pissed away shit tons of public money into shareholder pockets and all we've got left is insolvent infrastructure companies (whether it's water or sewage or transport) we now have to bail out with even more public money.
I know your joking, but some flights have been diverted to Paris where the airlines are bussing passengers to London! So yeah, there kinda is a replacement bus service for some flights!
> Perth Qantas customers who had their flights diverted from London to Paris after a massive power outage at Heathrow Airport will be put on buses to take them to take them to their final destination.
Technically it means "naturally" which (to me, natural UK English) reads to me as slightly less sarcastic than "of course", especially if you get the "of COURSE" intonation (implies "the little shits" at the end of the sentence to me, if you see what I mean. "Naturally, the BBC has the news" - good job, fellas! "Of COURSE, the BBC has the news" - the little shits, running around wasting our money on this, probably stealing from rubbish bins.)
You’re not alone! I remember natch having a connotation of bragging, too, e.g. “I played my new set last night. Three women gave me their numbers. Natch.”
The substations decribed in the power network case study above are for local distribution – 33kV stepping down to 11kV (×2) and 11kV to 415V (x12).
The substation on fire (North Hyde) is a 275kV major distribution substation.
That's a fairly significant distribution loss in itself (not just Heathrow but also 16,000 homes), and rebalancing the distribution will need careful coordination – flipping the switch on a load the size of Heathrow would then imbalance the network for the new distribution supply site.
Speak for yourself, if mine don't bring in £50 a week each from their car-wash, it's 3 days in the cell in the basement on bread and water. For all of them. They're learning the importance of contributing.
UK Power Networks are the local network operator for London and the South East. The substation that has gone boom is a National Grid one, so it's presumably affecting things upstream of local substations. I'm surprised there's a single point of failure at this level though, you'd think Heathrow would be considered important enough to have multiple feeds at a national grid level.
Literally just guessing: that substation is on the train route to central London, which is the main public transport connection in and out of Heathrow. Indeed the Elizabeth tube line is suspended on the Heathrow branch.
So perhaps the core issue isn't inability of the airport to operate, but of people to get in and out.
I think it's likely the Elizabeth Line branch is suspended because the stations are closed, and the stations are closed because there's no power to the buildings.
Other trains are running on the main line through the area. It's 25kV electrification, there's plenty of distance between feeder substations.
National Rail say [1] "An unadvertised shuttle service is running from Heathrow Terminals to London Paddington to ensure customers and colleagues can leave the airport" so trains can and are running, they just don't want flight passengers to go to the airport.
I doubt they would suspend flights for that. Heathrow is used by people from all over South England, not just London, so a good proportion of customers come by car. Not to mention the people doing transits. Also TFL has a stock of buses which they use if a rail line goes down.
What I don't get is that the government now says it wants a 3rd runway (this has been debated for 30 years). Why add a 3rd runway, costing billions and taking decades, to an airport that can't use it 24-7 due to noise restrictions, and doesn't even have resilient power from the grid. Heathrow should have been bulldozed years ago and replaced with housing, and the estuary airport built. Or the Maplin Sands project 50 years before that.
Adding a runway to an existing airport is relatively low risk and comparatively cheaper than building a new major airport altogether. Anyone considering the latter will surely look at the Berlin Brandenburg Airport [0], which ran roughly €4 billion over budget and opened nine years behind schedule. Given the dire financial situation of the United Kingdom right now, I would wager this is an incredibly hard sell.
I feel like if you build that extra capacity it will immediately get used and you will still have no extra capacity in these situations. An airport holding extra capacity feels like it's just burning money given the demand.
According to a BBC News report in 1970,[12] it was determined that if the wreck of Richard Montgomery exploded, it would throw a 300 metres (980 feet)-wide column of water and debris nearly 3,000 metres (9,800 feet) into the air and generate a wave 5 metres (16 feet) high. Almost every window in Sheerness (population circa 20,000) would be broken and buildings would be damaged by the blast
It would damage buildings and shatter every window in town. Look up videos of the Beirut explosion to gain a sense of the amount of energy involved. Even with water as a shield the force and shockwave will still inflict harm.
(1) the UK doesn't have Tsunami warnings, because it doesn't have Tsunamis. This also means they don't know how to deal with them institutionally.
(2) Right by a river leading directly into the capital. I don't know how far away a 2m tsunami would actually go, is it close enough to the river entrance to focus it? https://www.floodmap.net to play with what "2m" would mean to the local area.
Old oil transformer. The insulation breaks down in old transformers. It happens sometimes. No need to involve Russian conspiracy theories at this point in time... :-)
You joke but make a good point, most major installations have backup diesel powered generators to provide power for a certain limited but generous time.
What happened with Heathrows generators? Did they kick in? Do they have any?
IANAL but, you should be in contact with your airline about your specific flight.
You are entitled to be re-booked on the next available flight or get a refund. If you take a refund the airline has no obligation to you anymore. You might find after taking a refund, the price of an equivalent flight is now much more.
I know - but I'm going to a concert in London, if the flight isn't going at its original time then there's no point going. I'll just take a refund and drive instead, but so far it looks like flights will operate as normal tomorrow.
If you haven't already, consider quitting air travel altogether.
This and quitting meat consumption (or significantly reducing either or both luxuries- I quit flying years ago, and I eat meat once a month or so as a delicous luxury) seem to be the two main ways we can reduce our individual carbon footprint, focus on which is a bit scammy by the industry heads who want to keep converting resources into money to swim in, so please also consider lobbying for stronger regulation of our collective carbon footprint.
Public luxury (libraries, health care, bike lanes, public transportation, education from birth onward that isn't about preparing obedient workers for the mill but reinforcing the benefits of mutual aid and participatory democracy), private sufficiency (I have enough. I actually have more than enough, and have spent about fifteen years getting rid of physical and digital baggage that gets in the way of good relationships, with an exponential increase in recent years, leveling out again as I scrape the barrel for more to let go of). There are so many of us on this planet- believing the lie that we can all be wealthy (in capitalist terms) will accelerate boom-bust-quit, and I don't see the Moon or Mars working out very well. We can be wealthy in social-animal terms, though, by being kind and loving and reciprocal. It's not that simple, nor will it ever not be a messy, dynamic situation, but there's a beauty to that.
Funny, how we're all suddenly privy to highly classified information.
Yesterday, if you'd have publicly shared this one substation is enough to take down Heathrow for an entire day, you'd have been disappeared by the British spooks for sharing extremely sensitive information threatening national security and you'd probably end up behind bars for over a decade.
Today, we all just know because it happened to catch fire, exposing the flaw.
This kind of information has been available via open data for ages, and it isn't exactly hard for a foreign power with boots on the ground to figure out either.
With this kind of large-scale infrastructure it just isn't viable to rely on security through obscurity. If you want to protect against failure, invest in redundancy.
I didn’t mean this substation existing. I know that’s obviously not a secret. The fact taking it out takes out the entire main airport for at least an entire day is a different matter. Do you really think they’d have been fine with you announcing that to the world yesterday?
Don’t forget the BT Tower existing was technically classified under the official secrets act, even though it was extremely obviously there for everyone to see including on maps.
There's "significant problems" and there's taking out *the* most important airport in the country. Yes, there are other airports but this one matters most. Both in terms of (inter)national perception and in terms of real damage to the economy.
From an US perspective it'd be like taking out JFK, LAX and ATL at the same time. But even then, it doesn't really compare.
What a weird take. Arresting someone for reporting a major security vulnerability is pretty shitty thing for a state to do. What you're suggesting is that that's not actually that bad.
Same sort of logic that leads to people getting arrested for looking at HTML and reporting that it includes passwords.
Renaud discovered that Social Security numbers for teachers, administrators and counselors were visible in the HTML code of a public Missouri State Education website and reported it.
Governor Mike Parson tried to file charges against him and labelled him as a criminal for doing so.
I've been on the side of disclosing a handful of times and it's a gamble each time whether I'm going to get a CFAA threat (both implicit and explicit threats).
> What you're suggesting is that that's not actually that bad.
When did I ever say or imply that? I agree that intelligence agencies are draconian, but to imply that you'd be locked away (never to be heard from again) for pointing out that a substation could be bombed and cause power issues is ridiculous.
They were using a bit of hyperbole for sure (though another poster accurately pointed out to you methods used against Northern Irish folk), but the reaction of gov agencies to use imprisonment (even as a threat!) for pointing out security fuckups isn't without precedence. It's happened to me :)
So, I guess I really don't understand your point. That being arrested for pointing these things out isn't bad because it's not being disappeared?
I shouldn’t have used the word disappeared, I just meant picked up. And yeah no, not for saying a substation exists and could be bombed.
But for saying there is a single substation that, if taken out (by sabotage, terror attack, arson, or whatever), would cause great embarrassment and economic damage to the country by disabling THE British Airport? I think that’s a whole different matter.
> we're all suddenly privy to highly classified information
Its not highly classified. Its not even plain classified.
Its available on streetmap. The substation (like most are) is located on the edge of a residential area / industrial estate. People walk and drive past it every day.
Looking at streetmap, there's even a multiple big signs outside that says "North Hyde Substation". They don't even make any effort to hide it with obscured fencing, its all out in the open.
As others have also pointed out, its in open data downloads for ages.
The fact this substation exists, yes, obviously. The fact taking it out takes out the entire airport: not so much! These kind of things usually aren’t dependent on a single substation. The fact that it is, is not something the UK government would have liked to be made public.
> The fact taking it out takes out the entire airport: not so much! These kind of things usually aren’t dependent on a single substation.
Let me re-phrase that for you:
It only took down the airport because the airport clearly did insufficient capacity planning in terms of backup mechanisms.
How can I be so confident ?
Because that exact same substation serves a number of large datacentres in the vicinity.
Due to the grid constraints previously discussed here, many of those same datacentres take ALL their feeds (A,B,C etc.) off that one substation, the only difference is the cables are diversely routed. Not their choice, it was imposed on them by the grid.
They have ALL been without ANY electrical feeds all day. I know that for a fact.
HOWEVER, those same datacentres have been running non-stop like nothing happened. I know that for a fact.
Why, because they have N+1 generators (which are regularly tested) with at least 48 hours of fuel, which was topped up this morning as soon as it became clear it was a major incident and with multiple fuel deliveries already pre-scheduled from multiple independent suppliers. I know that for a fact.
The grid are of course very busy trying to work some magic to re-arrange things to get the datacentres back online. Meanwhile the datacentres are very happy to keep ticking away on generator power for as long as it takes, its not a problem for them, its an event they plan, prepare and practice for.
Heathrow could have done the same. They could have added generator plants here and there over the years when they re-built terminals and such like.
They didn't, or at least they didn't do so with sufficient capacity.
Maybe Heathrow also fell behind on their generator maintenance and testing regimes. Who knows...
There are people out there who say it is because their motto is "spend little, charge a lot", so they did de-minimis, prefering to focus on maximising revenue generating space. I could not possibly comment.
Sure, no argument there, but the fact is there was a weakness there and a weakness that would be considered a threat to national security if it were to get out - before today
> weakness that would be considered a threat to national security if it were to get out - before today
If it was considered a "threat to national security", that substation site would have been much better secured.
In addition, if it was a "threat to national security", the site location would not be on open public databases, it would be on List X.
As it stands, the substation site "security" consists of two low, easily scalable, fences. And probably some CCTV. That's about it.
Security by obscurity is not security. We are in 2025, you have streetview and satellite photos.
Anybody who knows anything about electricity distribution could look at that substation and tell you it was pretty important given the large size of transformers located there.
It also doesn't take a rocket scientist to see Heathrow is minutes away and put two and two together.
And if you think the bad guys don't have the ability to give some poorly paid maintenance guy at the electricity company some cash in relation for extra detail, I've got an igloo to sell you.
Not a conspiracy theorist here, but... there's been quite a few expensive things which caught fire in Europe in the past year and change and it turned out those things didn't catch it by accident.
And it's very clear that multiple undersea cables have been intentionally cut by Russia-linked entities. You just don't drag anchors for hours over known cables by accident (the cables are on charts precisely to help captains avoid damaging them).
We're at war with Russia, and these kinds of attacks have both economic and psychological harms. They also allow Russia to practice techniques in case they need to ramp things up for a hotter conflict.
You don't get disappeared in UK. Stuff goes wrong, Gov does stupid things, so do police - but that's process/people being stupid, not institutionalized disappearances.
An Helicopter, has been running multiple 360 degrees rounds, around the whole perimeter of Heathrow for the last two hours or three hours.
I wonder if they are looking for something or somebody and there is more to this story. (click on the helicopter icon to see previous runs): https://www.flightradar24.com/GINTV/3990e5fc
It's the BBC's news helicopter, according to the first result of a Google search. It's very easy to make these searches, and not invent conspiratorial nonsense.
It's not the first time a major airport is down because of power failure, and other airports are working to address this type of vulnerability.
> The power vulnerability for airports was never made more obvious and painful than in Atlanta seven years ago. An underground electrical system fire in late 2017 damaged two substations and caused a complete outage lasting nearly 12 hours at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport
https://www.microgridknowledge.com/microgrids/article/551275...
Heathrow's power outage is much worse than Atlanta's, this is really bad. Allow me to make my point:
1. UK’s has one major airport to get out of the country—Heathrow. Gatwick and that lot don’t carry the same weight. When Heathrow goes down, you’re proper stuck. Atlanta has DC, Miami right there.
2. UK allows transit visas, so half the people transiting can’t even step out the terminal, what do they do when the airport is closed?
The US doesn’t allow that, everyone clears customs/passport control, so no ‘no man’s land’ limbo for stranded passengers.
3. Heathrow's outage is going to take 24 hours as of right now. That's twice Atlanta
This is laughably poor geography.
Both Gatwick [0] and Stansted are busier than either Washington airport [1], and if you're considering Miami as an alternative to Atlanta then why not similarly ridiculous options like Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin for passengers stuck in Heathrow?
Miami and DC aren't even close to the nearest major airport cities to Atlanta. Charlotte and Orlando are many hours closer and busier [1] in terms of commercial passengers (though still not as convenient as the UK's comparable airports).
Only about a quarter of Heathrow passengers are transiting [2] and a significant portion of those are citizens of the US, EU, UK and other countries who don't need a visa. Maybe 10% of passengers are stuck in limbo, not half of them.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_airports_in_...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_busiest_airports...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/303939/flight-transfers-...
I'm late to this thread, but can you please edit out swipes from your HN comments? Your comment would be excellent without that first bit.
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Hi dang, did you extend their comments' "editability" or is it already a feature I have been missing all along? I mean ability to edit/delete after a certain time (I guess it's a few hours right now?).
It's an aspirational 'edit out'. As in, 'don't include them in the future'.
> When Heathrow goes down, you’re proper stuck. Atlanta has DC, Miami right there
"right there"
It is a ten hour drive from Atlanta to DC. It is a nine hour drive from Atlanta to Miami.
It is a six hour drive from Heathrow to Paris.
Florida is very long.
[flagged]
No, but it does include the time to get yourself and your vehicle on to and off of the train that carries vehicles through the Channel Tunnel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LeShuttle
Ye, I've been travelling on it since the first week it opened. But if you were redirected and had to fend for yourself you would need to book ahead on a tunnel or boat, hire a car to drive from France to Coquelles - find somewhere to drop the car, hire another car in the UK. All assuming you land in Paris in the morning early enough to do all this.
Yes, all of which could be done in hours less time than it would take to get from Atlanta to any comparable airport.
Consider the amount of train/ferry transit between London and Paris. That doesn't exist in the US. Rental car companies don't keep that much extra stock on hand, and really do not love renting cars for inter-state one-way journeys.
I categorically reject that getting from Atlanta to London with ATL nonoperational would be either faster or easier than getting from London to Atlanta with LHR nonoperational.
Fair enough if you categorically reject it. That's good enough for me.
Thanks for admitting he's right.
Well given what they (you know it's a he?) actually wrote...
Then your comment about rowing across the sea is idiotic.
The airlines that redirected flights to Paris arranged buses to London.
Having thought about it you're correct. Even if you over inflate your tyres it won't provide enough buoyancy even for the smallest Euro-car.
An alternative reading to it 'being idiotic' is that it was clearly an exaggeration to prompt some critical thinking about the original claim.
What critical thinking? The train from London to Paris is barely above 2 hours. Why on earth would you drive if you’re in hurry?
I was replying to "It is a six hour drive from Heathrow to Paris"
Well yes, but I’m just curious in what way was the original comment supposed to promote critical thinking
There's a train between the UK and France. It carries cars.
That I use regularly to actually drive from no-too-far from LHR to Paris and back. It's a thing I actually do.
And I can tell you, it might be theoretically in Google Maps land to do the journey in 6 hours, but IRL in this scenario it won't happen. Actual empirical evidence.
The Eurostar train from London to Paris takes only 2.5 hours. Much faster than driving.
In theory yes, but we were specifically talking about driving. And whilst 6 hours CDG to LHR is possible in theory (and I've done it a number of times), it does depend on a whole load of other factors that are not present compared to hiring a car at US airport 1 and driving to US airport 2.
Unless you're in the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
I brought up driving to illustrate the incorrectness of the original claim, the person I replied to did not mention driving. The person you replied to is correct to bring up the EuroStar option.
By the way, the snide remarks you add to the end to each of your comments may be better suited for a place like Reddit or TruthSocial. The community standards guidelines for HN can be found at the bottom of the page.
I was replying to "It is a six hour drive from Heathrow to Paris."
I live close enough to LHR to notice the replacement of Boeing/Airbus with Cessna/Pipers from local airfields in the sky today. I also regularly drive to and/from Paris.
It is a six hour drive. But ONLY if you have your car ready, have booked a crossing ahead of time (otherwise you might want to slap another half day on those times), make no stops, you don't end up in a queue at UK customs (1 hour+ not infrequent occurrance). Don't happen to have your car sitting at CDG waiting for you? You'll have to hire one, but you'll be unlikely to be able to take that to the UK so you're then finding somewhere to drop that off and somehow cross as a foot passenger which you can't do on Le Shuttle...
Point being, cross-border travel throws up all of these hurdles which you simply don't have in the US example.
It's also less agro
It's still "right there" overall, you can take a local flight that takes one hour.
Most importantly, you're in the same country whereas in the case of LHR closing the number of airports able to handle widebody long haulers...are essentially all in countries with different customs and visas.
> It's still "right there" overall, you can take a local flight that takes one hour.
From which airport? The one that is closed because there's no power?
The US has dozens of smaller commercial and even private airports, same for London honestly so this isn't the greatest arguement except it doesn't need to deal with customs.
At least Ireland and the UK are in one visa regime, outside of Schengen. And because there are plenty of flights between Ireland and Schengen countries, all commercial Irish airports should have passport control.
But Dublin airport has about 1/2 the gates of Heathrow...
1: It's clearly not been as disruptive as you're suggesting. Flights have been diverted to airports within a few hour's journey by bus or train, others have been cancelled, just like would happen with Atlanta.
2: I don't know if they've done it, but the UK can grant entry for a few days to affected passengers. This will be part of a contingency plan.
3: The airport reopened for some flights already.
> UK’s has one major airport to get out of the country—Heathrow.
I’ve been using Edinburgh airport and Glasgow airport for 40 years to “get out of the country”.
I like how US’s lack of automatic transit visas is being described as a good thing here. It is an absolutely nightmare in practice.
Hahahaha what. The UK has multitude of airports that get you out of the country, even long-haul. Manchester, for example.
> 2. UK allows transit visas, so half the people transiting can’t even step out the terminal, what do they do when the airport is closed?
Airside to airside bus shuttle?
> The US doesn’t allow that, everyone clears customs/passport control, so no ‘no man’s land’ limbo for stranded passengers.
Anchorage International Airport, amongst few (less than a handful really) other US airports, have separate international section with sterilised transit.
> It's not the first time a major airport is down because of power failure, and other airports are working to address this type of vulnerability.
To be fair, I'd probably be more interested to hear what major airports are doing to avoid a reoccurance of CrowdStrike-type scenarios. Which is perhaps a more likely re-occurence than loss of substation feeds.
"Selected Airports’ Efforts to Enhance Electrical Resilience": https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-105203.pdf
Seems like a national security issue if there’s a single point of failure a few miles away that can take down one of Europe’s largest airports and global air travel.
Why would it be a national security issue?
Military airports are working fine. National security doesn't rely on civilian airports. And communications networks aren't disrupted or anything. This isn't enabling terrorism.
It's absolutely a huge economic issue. Economic-political. But I'm not seeing a national security angle here.
"[...] national security is widely understood to include also non-military dimensions, such as the security from terrorism, minimization of crime, economic security, energy security, environmental security, food security, and cyber-security."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security
Large-scale issues that impact the economy are typically under the "national security" umbrella. It's a term that uses the broad definition of "security".
Whether this incident qualifies, I don't know, but "national security" is definitely not just about military stuff. Just like how "food security" isn't about physically protecting food from damage.
While I agree with you, this is a huge issue with the term "security" and what it means to "provide security" as a government, because at some point almost everything can be labeled as a "national security threat" if it happens to be against the political desiderata of any one controlling said governments at a certain moment in time.
I feel like this sort of "security reflex" only got worst after 9/11, it was already there before even before that point but starting with Bush jr. it cascading into lots and lots of non-military related areas.
Security, harm, aggression, violence, genocide. Redefine at your pleasure.
I am not sure I am enthusiastic with the slow march toward 'national security issue' being synonymous with 'me personally being spooked by something'.
Or 'my flight was delayed for a few hours'
I think the phrase everyone is searching for is “critical national infrastructure”. That is a defined term in the UK, and includes digital things like GOV.UK: https://www.npsa.gov.uk/critical-national-infrastructure-0
Amusingly, some media outlets confused the Scandinavian SAS airline with Britain's SAS Special Forces unit, and reported that the special forces unit had cancelled its trips out of Heathrow :) https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/live/2025/mar/21/hayes-s...
While I agree that saying this is a big national security issue is overstating it, if an adversary can cripple you economically because you have a few single points of failure, that is a national security issue
“National security, or national defence (national defense in American English), is the security and defence of a sovereign state, including its citizens, *economy*, and institutions, which is regarded as a duty of government.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security
Whether mere incompetence from those whose job it is to check such installations for failure or bad actors, other 'bad actors' will have gained a useful indication of how vulnerable Britain’s infrastructure is to attack. It's reckoned > 290K passengers have flights cancelled or diverted and ensuring chaos for days.
Most militarily-significant targets are themselves non-military.
The Russian war of aggression on Ukraine is a prime example: power infrastructure, transportation, communications, commercial hubs, healthcare, and general civilian targets of opportunity are all targeted with high frequency by Russian forces.
UK national security interests are spelled out in summary beginning on page 5 of this PDF, "Government Functional Standard: GovS 007: Security", notably
Each organisation’s governance and management framework shall cover physical, personnel, cyber, incident management, technical and industry security
<https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/613a195bd3bf7...> (PDF)
The US electric grid has also been of significant concern. Ted Koppel's book Lights Out (2015) addressed this specificly:
<https://news.wttw.com/2015/11/09/ted-koppel-americas-vulnera...>
As an example of non-military focus, the present US national security policy leads with ... tourist visas:
To protect Americans, the United States must be vigilant during the visa-issuance process to ensure that those aliens approved for admission into the United States do not intend to harm Americans or our national interests.
<https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/prot...> (20 Jan 2025)
An earlier document from the Bush II White House leads with:
People everywhere want to be able to speak freely; choose who will govern them; worship as they please; educate their children—male and female; own property; and enjoy the benefits of their labor.
<https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/nsc/nssall.html> (2002)
Wikipedia's National Security article notes:
Originally conceived as protection against military attack, national security is widely understood to include also non-military dimensions, such as the security from terrorism, minimization of crime, economic security, energy security, environmental security, food security, and cyber-security.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security>
> Most militarily-significant targets are themselves non-military.
Indeed. Large scale war is extremely expensive. Russia's government is spending about 40% of total tax revenue on invading Ukraine. So anything it can do to harm the economies of the people fighting it helps. Equally, this is why Ukraine has been putting so much effort into blowing up oil and gas infrastructure in Russia, their #1 source of tax revenue.
perhaps they should blow up some airport substations as well...
Huge economic issues threaten national security.
Economic and infrastructural sabotage isn't an unprecedented act in the last few years anyhow.
Few people actually include necessary infrastructure into their threat model and almost no one is willing to pay the cost of building effective redundancy into the system. I could probably shut down any airport in the world with a few late-night firebombs tossed into the right substation.
And no, it is not a national security issue. There are three other airports in the London region, plus RAF Norholt and RAF Kenly inside the M25 ring.
I used to live next to RAF Kenley, it's not really usable in any valuable way - it's a relic. It's for gliders only with no powered flight allowed. It has no facilities and is very uneven/roughly paved, but could probably accept landings of small planes or fighters in extremis. Biggin Hill would be used instead if you needed an airport in that immediate area.
Small world, I was gliding there yesterday. Agreed, given the state of the runway, Biggin Hill or Redhill would be a better alternative.
Heathrow is a significant part of the UK economy, what is with the dismissive attitude?
I don't imagine an american being so dismissive about JFK being taken offline.
> Heathrow is a significant part of the UK economy
Is it, really ?
From Heathrow's own website[1], so we can expect figures on the "generous" side:
"Heathrow Airport is expected to contribute approximately £4.7bn to the UK economy "
This incident started somewhere around midnight and is currently estimated to be resolved by 15:00. So let's round that up to "one day".
£4.7bn divided by 365 is £12.8m
Compared to say, the UK financial services sector which contributed £208.2bn to the UK economy in 2023[2] where an equivalent day out would cost £570m .... Heathrow's paltry £12m is equivalent to a 30 minute outage in the financial sector.
Also, to put it further into perspective - Tesco, the UK's biggest supermarket operator - had revenues of £68bn last year...[3]
[1]https://www.heathrow.com/content/dam/heathrow/web/common/doc... [2]https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06... [3] https://companiesmarketcap.com/gbp/tesco/revenue/
Does that count only the actual airport? It doesn't count the potential business travellers contributing to the economy in different ways. Like if half of the financial sector were due to arrive at Heathrow, where would that be in the analysis?
Just to downplay the importance of Heathrow through numbers is a bit absurd.
If half the financial sector is in the plane somehow, and they decide “oh, the airport has a power outage, better crash into the ocean instead,” that might make a major difference. More likely they will go land at a different airport or delay their travel, depending on there they are in the process.
It’s just delays, not destruction.
You missed the parent's point, which is that a significant fraction of people flying to London because they have business to do in London, and the value of their time is not zero. If their time is wasted, that has a real cost in terms of lost productivity.
I don’t think I did miss their point. The loss is not the deletion of their productivity, it is the cost of shifting that productivity back by a day or so.
I've flown through Heathrow a dozen or so times, and have spent maybe $200 in various shops and restaurants. Outside the airport, I spent months working on projects, and both I and the projects involved much more than $200. An analysis that includes only direct spending misses the overall impact.
All right, but if Heathrow was down for a day, what would you do? Cancel the trip, and never go at all? Or would you go a day later, or through a different airport, or fly to Manchester and take the train?
Even if the airline let you, why would you travel to Manchester? That's half a day and a £100 train fare away from London. There's still Gatwick, Stansted and Luton in 'London', plus Cardiff, Birmingham and Bristol as alternatives.
If money were no object even Amsterdam Schiphol or Brussels would make for a faster journey than Manchester!
Hey, clueless American here. I confess I have no idea how far apart things are in the UK. "Closer than in the US" is all I've got.
Ah, right! Here's an approximate comparison then, measuring from one of the terminus stations serving central London, according to railway timetable data:
0h 30m - Heathrow
1h 00m - Gatwick
1h 00m - Luton
1h 30m - Stansted
2h 30m - Manchester
3h 00m - Birmingham
3h 00m - Bristol
4h 00m - Cardiff
Plus Channel Tunnel trains:
2h 00m - Brussels
4h 00m - Amsterdam
Looks like I was wrong about Manchester being further than Cardiff though!!
Birmingham airport to London is 1h 10m though there are slower services.
It's very reasonable, and I wouldn't hesitate to do this if it was a business trip.
Many flights have been diverted to Manchester, partly because airlines with flights to Heathrow also have flights from Manchester, but are less likely to have flights from the other London airports.
Manchester Airport railway station is 2 minutes walk from the airport's main entrance, I think using a covered walkway, or maybe it was underground. Going to London takes 2¾ hours with one change, trains run every 20 minutes.
It would be more convenient to be diverted somewhere a bit closer, but on the scale of an intercontinental flight it's not a big deal.
> Cardiff, Birmingham and Bristol as alternatives ... even Amsterdam Schiphol or Brussels would make for a faster journey than Manchester!
Cardiff Airport to London takes 3 hours by train, Bristol Airport about 2½ hours, both are less frequent. Amsterdam is four hours by train, Brussels is around 3 hours.
Birmingham (BHX) and East Midlands (EMA) are the only airports closer to London in travel time than Manchester.
By what basis are Brussels or Amsterdam closer to London from Manchester? Manchester is a 2 hour train ride from London. Brussels is similar, but there’s at least an hour of mandatory security and waiting. Amsterdam is much further away.
Thats not really a fair comparison. Youve compared an entire industry to one entity within an industry. Id be interested to see what the numbers would be if you shutdown all commercial UK airports for a day. Still smaller I'd imagine, but at least comparable
> Thats not really a fair comparison.
If we're going to be pedantic about fair comparisons, then really you would need to, for example:
Remove airport duty-free sales figures since that has a negligible effect on the UK economy, but does pad up their bottom line.
Remove leisure passenger derived numbers. Because "passenger tourism contributes to the UK economy" type data are very much finger in the air subjective estimates prone to bias and massaging. For example, common scenario is relatives coming to stay. They stay at your house, you feed them at your house, their net contribution to the UK economy is effectively naff all apart from maybe a couple of museum and transport tickets.
Or they could compare it to an asteroid hitting the UK and wiping all all life within a 200 mile radius.
A significant part of the economy perhaps, but 'national security threat' is a somewhat higher bar IMHO. LHR has a role of convenience, but not necessity. If JFK was shut down for a day or two and had limited operations for another week it would be inconvenient but would barely register in the national economic stats. I am on a flight heading out of Heathrow on Sunday for work travel and have booked an alternative out of Gatwick just in case. Inconvenient, but not a massive problem.
What will be telling here is how quickly things adapt to the disruption. I expect to feel more impact from the loss of power to businesses in the surrounding area that are involved in air shipment than in the flight disruptions (e.g. cold chain logistics and inventory management for just-in-time processes that warehouse near the airport.)
> What will be telling here is how quickly things adapt to the disruption.
Most people won't have to. The substation area covers 62,000 properties, but only 4,800 are actually without power as a result of the incident. In addition they are expecting restoration of power by 15:00 same-day.[1]
[1] https://powertrack.ssen.co.uk/powertrack#QQ0573
That link isn't working currently, and when I checked it earlier it was referring to an outage which started late yesterday night. So I'm not sure it was relevant.
> So I'm not sure it was relevant.
It is.
If you read the text on the link it very much describes the situation, e.g. talking about the substation.
Second, the start time and other data (e.g. number of properties affected) correlates with that stated by the London Fire Brigade on their website[1]
[1] https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/incidents/2025/march/fire-at-...
Oh, I see. My apologies, for some reason I thought the fire started in the early morning hours.
According to the news reports, the fire started at roughly 23:30.
UTC? ET?
Consider reading the article if you need this much detail on the topic.
Local time.
> Heathrow is a significant part of the UK economy
You'll need to back up that assertion.
I imagine any American who thought about it would have a similarly 'dismissive' attitude.
I mean sure it's expensive, but economic harm (unless it's intentional and large-scale) is not really seen as a national security issue in the UK.
> I could probably shut down any airport in the world with a few late-night firebombs tossed into the right substation.
So basically this is what Putin is trying to do - find vulnerable points and attack them. For now, creating disruption without human casualties.
> Seems like a national security issue if there’s a single point of failure
No. Its not.
Its the fact that the decades of under-investment in power distribution infrastructure is coming home to roost.
Its no secret there's little to no "fat" in the UK grid system. Hence it has difficulty coping with black-swan events such as this.
Anyone who buys datacentre space in London knows the reason prices have gone through the roof in recent years. Its becasue the grid simply cannot get the extra capacity to where it is needed. And this is before energy prices started rising due to the UK's electricity being mostly dependent on gas (previous governments having sold off gas-storage facilities to build houses on the land instead).
That's why its also a pain in the backside to build new banks of EV fast chargers anywhere in the UK. Getting the power there involves long, protracted, discussions with the grid followed by payments of large amounts of money and a written promise to the grid that you agree to load-shedding at any time if necessary.
I suspect you will find its not a single point of failure either. Its just that Hayes is a high-demand area, so see above for lack of excess capacity .... if one site goes boom, the other will struggle to take on 100% load.
> I suspect you will find its not a single point of failure either. It’s just that Hayes is a high-demand area, so see above for lack of excess capacity .... if one site goes boom, the other will struggle to take on 100% load.
Hayes (North Hyde) is a few miles NE of Heathrow, but Laleham (similar sized) is only a few miles South - I’d would have assumed both served as fully redundant supplies for the airport, given it’s critical national infrastructure.
(The old BBC Television Centre in London had three independent supplies, I believe)
> (The old BBC Television Centre in London had three independent supplies, I believe)
There's a story, possibly apocryphal, that the UK nuclear deterrent submarines used the continued broadcast of Radio 4 as a dead-man switch to determine if nuclear war had broken out and they needed to open the safe containing their orders.
Which is to say: What counts as "critical national infrastructure" can be surprising.
Radio 4 on long wave, I believe - which is only guaranteed until the end of June this year because the BBC’s stock of irreplaceable high power valves is running out. As well as triggering Armageddon the LW signal also switched older electricity meters (phew, back on topic!) between standard daytime and cheap overnight power.
How do you say No it's not and then describe points of failure leading to national security issues?
>And this is before energy prices started rising due to the UK's electricity being mostly dependent on gas ...
Wind was the dominant source of energy in the UK last year:
https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q4-2024/wind-becomes-...
So .. why are people trying to build new datacentre space in London rather than somewhere a bit further away and less expensive? Easier to put the datacentre near the power and run some fiber rather than the other way round, surely?
The expense is unpleasant, but the money has to come from somewhere, and the user paying is easier to justify than all the other bill-payers collectively or the taxpayer.
> why are people trying to build new datacentre space in London rather than somewhere a bit further away and less expensive?
Most likely some combination of:
Almost certainly many more things I've missed, those are just a few off the top of my head.There are various locations outside of Central London but within the M25 boundary. But YMMV when it comes to being any less expensive. I suspect you will find the Outer London market has "hardened" over the last few years.
Verging into cynical territory, marketing might come into it a little bit. "Telehouse London" sounds cooler in the customer presentation "Telehouse near some village you've never heard of".
The UK has a weird National Grid system whereby the cost of electricity is the same nationwide (except Scotland)
So datacenters build in London as the connection/electricity price is same as building in rural areas and they'd obviously prefer being closer to users in London.
They build datacentres in/near London and also elsewhere in the country.
Here's one example map: https://www.colo-x.com/data-centre-database-map/
Probably because of easier access to qualified workforce.
You keep saying “No it’s not” and then describing exactly what most people would call “a single point of failure” and “a national security issue” in a lot more words.
> You keep saying “No it’s not” and then describing exactly what most people would call “a single point of failure” and “a national security issue” in a lot more words.
What are you on about ?
Its not a national security issue. Full stop. There are many other airports in the London area and elesewhere in the UK. Heathrow is a civilian airport, not a military one. 99% of air cargo to the UK does NOT come to Heathrow.
Its not a single point of failure either. Sure, for those TEMPORARILY affected it might feel that way. But businesses with contingency plannign will simply invoke their DR plans and go elsewhere ... flights will divert, people will WFH instead of going the offices, people will have to travel to a supermarket a little bit further away.
Also, regarding "single point of failure", see this website[1]... 62,000 customers affected but only 4,800 without power[1]. Not quite a SPOF then is it !
Also, you want guaranteed N+1 resilience at grid level, who do you think is going to pay for that ?
Most people would be happy with the grid sorting out its capacity issues at N level, one thing at a time my friend.
[1] https://powertrack.ssen.co.uk/powertrack#QQ0573
"National security site" is not a synonym for "military installation."
It means "critical infrastructure whose failure causes significant adverse effects."
The UK's main airport is absolutely that.
Your quote about 99% of air cargo not coming through Heathrow is made-up nonsense. The correct figure is closer to around 50% by volume and 70% by value.
https://www.heathrow.com/company/cargo
It's a major, major hub, not just for the UK but Europe, the US, and Rest of World.
> 99% of air cargo to the UK does NOT come to Heathrow.
Not even slightly true - Heathrow carries over 50% of air freight and is a major hub.
(https://www.heathrow.com/company/cargo)
> Heathrow carries over 50% of air freight and is a major hub.
Not denying it, but it does depend on what you're sending.
For example, if you send something by DHL, it has a significantly greater chance of going through East Midlands Airport than it does Heathrow.
Same for UPS and others. The bulk of their recent investments have been away from Heathrow.
The non-Heathrow sites have better road connections, and more importantly for air cargo, the noise abatement rules at non-Heathrow sites are more relaxed.
The other problem with Heathrow is that BA have their finger in the pies and they have too many slots, so that limits any growth on the independent freight side.
Heathrow has effectively hit its capacity limit. That may or may not change if they ever build the third runway.
> Not denying it
Your original post did though!
Heathrow undoubtedly does the most air cargo. Sure express often comes into EMA on dedicated flights, but lots of freight comes in the hold of passenger aircraft, and that’s where Heathrow is king. The lack of passenger traffic is undoubtedly a key reason why EMA only does 1/5th of Heathrow’s air cargo, as as you have noted it’s ideally located to serve a lot of the UK.
It's really quite incredible how people just make shit up, even in this board
>Heathrow is a civilian airport, not a military one.
Not saying this incident is or isn't a national security issue, but this is not really pertinent to whether an incident is classified as a national security issue.
National security encompasses much more than just military-related stuff. The "security" part of "national security" is using a broad definition of security (like "food security" isn't strictly about physically protecting food from damage).
National security definitively covers civilian infrastructure. In fact military defense primary purpose is protecting civilian restructure.
This was my first thought.
My second thought is, UK infra is crumbling so bad, this is really most likely just business as usual...
It's all been privatized and they don't care about anything other than maintaing profits so of course we're seeing the effects now. It's also why every single water provider in the UK is dumping raw sewage into our rivers and when the government tries to make them fix it they cry about how that will eat into their profits and how it's unfair.
Getting bailed out by the government because you ran it into the ground is the plan when you buy one of these assets.
Privitise the profits, socialise the losses. Makes perfect sense.
Also makes sense to pay for enough brainwashing to enable this.
Nope...
The UK electricity grid is nationalised - it's run by the National Energy System Operator (NESO).
> The UK electricity grid is nationalised
That is only a very recent change though, 1 October 2024[1].
Before that it was very much privatised, 1990–2024[2].
Technically in the background I suspect you will find very little has changed since October 2024 since (a) not enough time has passed (b) things like TUPE means you will end up with most of the same people doing the same things under a different logo, at least for a little while until changes get phased in.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Energy_System_Operato...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_(Great_Britain)
The top level grid - yes. Regional operators are private.
https://weownit.org.uk/public-ownership/energy
It's not looking good and the other alternative airports in the UK are at full capacity:
"Heathrow Doesn't Know When Power Will Be Back, Days of Disruption Expected" - https://www.newsweek.com/heathrow-airport-fire-counterterror...
If the entire transformer is lost, procuring replacement transformers for substations can take from several months to years. Insulation failures are relatively common in older power substations. It seems someone should have done a better job preparing disaster recovery scenarios for Heathrow.
Edit:
BBC reporting "some power" restored on a "interim basis" as the power company is now using a different substation. It would be curious if the increased effort on other substations would then cause further power failures...A bit like the postmortems of global cloud providers, where taking a node out, causes increased stress on other nodes...
One would hope the utility would have a spare transformer or two sitting around, I guess that’s not guaranteed tho. MV and HV transformers have extremely long lead times like you said.
the utility are expecting to go back on at 3pm...
(edit: and are back)
Yeap: https://www.nationalgrid.com/incidents
Heathrow isn't the only airport near London so redundancy is already built
Yes and no. The vast majority of commercial flights what would have landed at Heathrow today won't be landing at a different London airport instead. There isn't spare, redundant capacity for that. Instead the flights will be cancelled.
https://www.thelocal.dk/20250321/sas-cancels-flights-from-no...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly6e24q8glo
But that's not a national security concern. That's just an annoyance.
For national security London and UK can scramble several other airports for important flights.
If by "national security issue" we mean "can the UK move military aircraft and important people" then no, Heathrow isn't key at all. There are other airbases and airports.
If we mean that a long outage would have economic impact and is hard to find the capacity elsewhere, then yes. As per grandparent post "take down one of Europe’s largest airports and global air travel".
Yeah well, not everything that annoys people and loses bussinesses money is a "national security issue", no matter how far the US overton window shifted on that matter.
A core goal of national security is protecting critical civilian infrastructure.
Always has been, always will be.
The problem is they’re all maxed out. So if one closes unexpectedly the others can’t just pick up the slack because they have no room…
So the solution to avoiding a few days of a LHR-sized gap in airport throughput is to build a permanent LHR-sized surplus?
JFK had similar issues and it's easy to see, still has the same single point of failures:
"Power outage cancels, diverts flights at Kennedy Airport" - https://apnews.com/article/new-york-city-power-outages-eb883...
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-105203.pdf
This crossed my mind. Was it an adversarial foreign nation state undertaking sabatgoe a la French train network on the opening day of the Olympics?
What would you suggest as a backup? Supposedly they have generators/redundancy but the place requires so much power that that can only maintain critical functions (I guess ensuring incoming flights can still land and taxi in the mins after the power loss).
One potential solution is to add a connection to a second substation. For example, Laleham is a few miles south of Heathrow, and can be fed without sharing any infrastructure with North Hyde.
I doubt it's worth the additional expenses, though. Transformers exploding like this is extremely rare, and the main reason this one has such an impact is because the firefighting effort required the other two transformers to be shut down. Investing in better physical separation between the individual transformers is probably a way more effective investment.
There’s also the issue that if one trips, it’ll like cause havoc with the other one.
but its expensive to fix single points of failure so lets just hope for the best.
Haven't they seen Die Hard 2?! /s
Grid power is hard. Even with local generation failovers for air and ground safety systems, Heathrow is massive and uses a lot of power (1-2MWh/day). It's hard to route around that sort of demand.
I don't disagree that this is something that shouldn't happen, but that's what we say for almost every preventable grid failure. I think this is a national inconvenience rather than a security issue though. There are short-term alternatives which will be used.
> Heathrow is massive and uses a lot of power (1-2MWh/day)
It's 3 orders of magnitude more: 1-2GWh/day.
https://www.heathrow.com/content/dam/heathrow/web/common/doc...
Yeah I munched the maths but yours is 10 years old!
The 2022 version of that sustainability report puts their annual bought in electricity at 272,610 MWh, 747 MWh per day.
My wonky maths aside, it's amazing how much energy they've saved. In your link, the switch to LEDs alone saw a 20% total power reduction. I'm sure I've seen electric vehicles there so I'm surprised this number is still apparently in freefall. Perhaps they're doing more local generation (eg) PV
While we're doing wacky units for energy instead of the joule, I'd personally prefer roughly 360 DeLorean's per day (assuming the 1.21 gigawatts are required for roughly 10 seconds)
> Heathrow is massive and uses a lot of power (1-2MWh/day).
That number doesn't seem that high, compared to a single high-speed train running at about 300kph or above. Or lets say all of the London Tube/DLR.
Seems like nothing, actually.
Yup I think I missed a comma when originally reading the sustainability report. They buy-in an average of 747 MWh a day (2022).
The point I was stumbling to try and make was that Heathrow is dense. Just under a GWh a day delivered to a 1200ha site isn't going to get a natural diversity of supply, especially compared to a rail system does.
Yeah, that can't be right. You can tow a 100 kW generator (2.4 MWh/day) with a pickup truck.
[0] suggests (without a useful link and my searching has not found one) that Heathrow is doing 460GWh annually. Presumably[1] that equates to 1.25GWh daily (which could be where the 1-2MWh/day came from - a simple unit error)?
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-03-21/heathr...
[1] I know precisely nothing about power consumption of large systems but dividing the annual figure by 365 seems plausible.
[flagged]
It might well be, but you don't have any proof of that. In Lithuania it took months of investigations to catch the culprits, analyze all evidence and make that statement. I can imagine in the UK it can take even more.
Finishing investigation is not point in time when people knew it was Putnam.
[flagged]
In the US, they use the tactic of electing a president. I'd rather have no power for a few hours
The UK is very good at sabotaging itself in order to enrich corporations/shareholders/politicians/oligarchs. No foreign influence necessary.
For Brexit - facebook and cambridge analytica got fined.... that is not UK sabotaging itself. US tools are very successful in UK because UK uses same freaking language as US does.
I wasn't talking about that at all - I was talking about bending over backwards when it comes to corporations or any kind of moneyed interests. We've pissed away shit tons of public money into shareholder pockets and all we've got left is insolvent infrastructure companies (whether it's water or sewage or transport) we now have to bail out with even more public money.
Is there going to be a replacement bus service for the flights?
I know your joking, but some flights have been diverted to Paris where the airlines are bussing passengers to London! So yeah, there kinda is a replacement bus service for some flights!
> https://thewest.com.au/travel/perth-to-london-flight-diverte...
> Perth Qantas customers who had their flights diverted from London to Paris after a massive power outage at Heathrow Airport will be put on buses to take them to take them to their final destination.
Yes, Airbus to be specific.
Boston can send the duck boats
BBC.com has much more details and answers (ofc)
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cly24zvvwxlt
What does "(ofc)" mean?
slang for "of course"
Natch, I feared as much. I've been seeing it more and more lately. I've found it's hard for me to look at. I'd say more but I'm already wasting words.
I wonder if anyone feels the same way about your use of "natch".
I do!
> I'd say more but I'm already wasting words.
ofc
It's quite old, I'm surprised you're only seeing it now
It's quite old, I'm surprised you're only seeing it now
Insert that xkcd comic
I needed to look up „natch” lol
Why don't you tell us too?
For anyone reading: it means "of course"
Technically it means "naturally" which (to me, natural UK English) reads to me as slightly less sarcastic than "of course", especially if you get the "of COURSE" intonation (implies "the little shits" at the end of the sentence to me, if you see what I mean. "Naturally, the BBC has the news" - good job, fellas! "Of COURSE, the BBC has the news" - the little shits, running around wasting our money on this, probably stealing from rubbish bins.)
I may have put too much thought into this.
You’re not alone! I remember natch having a connotation of bragging, too, e.g. “I played my new set last night. Three women gave me their numbers. Natch.”
Another one is ‘lol’
If you happen to see that one, it stands for ‘laughing out loud’.
I prefer o/c.
It looks like there's a fair bit of redundancy there https://www.ukpowernetworksservices.co.uk/case-studies/heath...
Sounds weird that one substation going down would close everything.
The substations decribed in the power network case study above are for local distribution – 33kV stepping down to 11kV (×2) and 11kV to 415V (x12).
The substation on fire (North Hyde) is a 275kV major distribution substation.
That's a fairly significant distribution loss in itself (not just Heathrow but also 16,000 homes), and rebalancing the distribution will need careful coordination – flipping the switch on a load the size of Heathrow would then imbalance the network for the new distribution supply site.
> not just Heathrow but also 16,000 homes
You are off by a large number. More like 62,000 customers affected (although "only" 4,800 are actually without power right now)[1].
Also that area is more than just "homes". There is a lot of heavy elecrical load commercial stuff going on in that area too.
[1]https://powertrack.ssen.co.uk/powertrack#QQ0573
16,000 homes * 4 people per home = 64,000 customers
Could that explain it?
Britain is not doing so strong economically, but we are not at the point of having the kids chip in for the electricity bill yet
Speak for yourself, if mine don't bring in £50 a week each from their car-wash, it's 3 days in the cell in the basement on bread and water. For all of them. They're learning the importance of contributing.
UK Power Networks are the local network operator for London and the South East. The substation that has gone boom is a National Grid one, so it's presumably affecting things upstream of local substations. I'm surprised there's a single point of failure at this level though, you'd think Heathrow would be considered important enough to have multiple feeds at a national grid level.
Literally just guessing: that substation is on the train route to central London, which is the main public transport connection in and out of Heathrow. Indeed the Elizabeth tube line is suspended on the Heathrow branch.
So perhaps the core issue isn't inability of the airport to operate, but of people to get in and out.
I think it's likely the Elizabeth Line branch is suspended because the stations are closed, and the stations are closed because there's no power to the buildings.
The Elizabeth line is fully electrified, so why wouldn't the issue be power to the trains themselves rather than the stations?
Other trains are running on the main line through the area. It's 25kV electrification, there's plenty of distance between feeder substations.
National Rail say [1] "An unadvertised shuttle service is running from Heathrow Terminals to London Paddington to ensure customers and colleagues can leave the airport" so trains can and are running, they just don't want flight passengers to go to the airport.
[1] https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/service-disruptions/heathrow-...
Ah, thanks, that makes sense.
I doubt they would suspend flights for that. Heathrow is used by people from all over South England, not just London, so a good proportion of customers come by car. Not to mention the people doing transits. Also TFL has a stock of buses which they use if a rail line goes down.
The Piccadilly line isn't noted as suspended, presumably it has its own electricity feed, so there are even still trains you could get.
Also it's not like Heathrow is on an island, in the worst case you could get everyone out by buses.
Lights are out in the terminals at LHR. https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cly24zvvwxlt
This is way worse due to London airports' lack of spare capacity. They should have built Thames Estuary Airport a long time ago.
What I don't get is that the government now says it wants a 3rd runway (this has been debated for 30 years). Why add a 3rd runway, costing billions and taking decades, to an airport that can't use it 24-7 due to noise restrictions, and doesn't even have resilient power from the grid. Heathrow should have been bulldozed years ago and replaced with housing, and the estuary airport built. Or the Maplin Sands project 50 years before that.
Adding a runway to an existing airport is relatively low risk and comparatively cheaper than building a new major airport altogether. Anyone considering the latter will surely look at the Berlin Brandenburg Airport [0], which ran roughly €4 billion over budget and opened nine years behind schedule. Given the dire financial situation of the United Kingdom right now, I would wager this is an incredibly hard sell.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport
Cheaper and lower risk still just to abolish the noise restrictions on the existing airport, allowing it to run 24-7.
The Thames Estuary Airport would be a good idea
But what can the UK do about the likelihood of Floods?
The bird migration that constantly fly where the Estuary would be
Or an accident happening at the Grain LNG Natural Gas Storage plant, one of the largest in the world that’s right next to where the airport would be?
I feel like if you build that extra capacity it will immediately get used and you will still have no extra capacity in these situations. An airport holding extra capacity feels like it's just burning money given the demand.
Oh no no, this airport would be the last! Promise. We just need one more.
So much this. They're still wanking over building a third runway at Heathrow which is about the worst possible solution.
I think one of the blockers to this is a very high risk of bird strikes.
Yes, unfortunately NIMBYs have been blocking any iota of progress in this area for around 40 years
That and the sunken ship full of explosives, yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery#/media/F...
I can think of a very quick way to make those explosives safe!
According to a BBC News report in 1970,[12] it was determined that if the wreck of Richard Montgomery exploded, it would throw a 300 metres (980 feet)-wide column of water and debris nearly 3,000 metres (9,800 feet) into the air and generate a wave 5 metres (16 feet) high. Almost every window in Sheerness (population circa 20,000) would be broken and buildings would be damaged by the blast
It's enough explosive to cause a 2m high tsunami in the estuary, iirc. Not an option.
That is absolutely an option which other sane nations would consider.
Issue a Tsunami warning and get everyone off the beach for an hour Sunday at 3am.
It would damage buildings and shatter every window in town. Look up videos of the Beirut explosion to gain a sense of the amount of energy involved. Even with water as a shield the force and shockwave will still inflict harm.
(1) the UK doesn't have Tsunami warnings, because it doesn't have Tsunamis. This also means they don't know how to deal with them institutionally.
(2) Right by a river leading directly into the capital. I don't know how far away a 2m tsunami would actually go, is it close enough to the river entrance to focus it? https://www.floodmap.net to play with what "2m" would mean to the local area.
Yeah the NIMBYs around Heathrow should just accept a third runway and 24 hour operation of the airport.
Is the power outage due to the fire? If so, what was the fire due to? How far back do we need to go on this? the Big Bang?
Old oil transformer. The insulation breaks down in old transformers. It happens sometimes. No need to involve Russian conspiracy theories at this point in time... :-)
"How to Prevent Substation Fires": https://www.oilbarriers.com/blog/suppress-substation-fires/
https://youtu.be/2np745xyQ7o
Probably, but definitely check for bullet holes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
just check newspapers title pages in UK today.... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70wylzyqw2o
It could be an old transformer, but it is not known at this time.
If we've learned anything from the California fires, the culprit will be global warming.
They didn't have enough solar panels on the roof?
You joke but make a good point, most major installations have backup diesel powered generators to provide power for a certain limited but generous time.
What happened with Heathrows generators? Did they kick in? Do they have any?
Edits: yes they did kick in as normal https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/heathrow-ed-miliband-nati...
Note that usually backup generators are only for essentials like air traffic control, landing lights, and operating emergency stuff.
That’s what I was wondering. Strange, that they didn’t plan to run the whole airport. Compared to construction costs and costs of disruption…
It would be too unsightly to put solar panels on those large flat shed roofs.
Well....I have a flight to LHR tomorrow morning, I'm guessing I should start looking at alternatives now :P
IANAL but, you should be in contact with your airline about your specific flight.
You are entitled to be re-booked on the next available flight or get a refund. If you take a refund the airline has no obligation to you anymore. You might find after taking a refund, the price of an equivalent flight is now much more.
I know - but I'm going to a concert in London, if the flight isn't going at its original time then there's no point going. I'll just take a refund and drive instead, but so far it looks like flights will operate as normal tomorrow.
If this wasn't executed by the FSB, then they're at least furiously taking notes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg5dg4p2l0o "Counter-terror officers from the Metropolitan Police are leading the investigation into a major fire that has closed Heathrow Airport"
Perhaps there should be an additional investigation why old transformers aren't replaced. The issue is known (275kV, just like the one in Heathrow):
https://electranet.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/15449-P...
Remove SPOF, build two transformer stations.
i wonder who would have the intelligence & motivation
Wow. Almost all the comments argue about whether this is a national security issue.
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If you haven't already, consider quitting air travel altogether.
This and quitting meat consumption (or significantly reducing either or both luxuries- I quit flying years ago, and I eat meat once a month or so as a delicous luxury) seem to be the two main ways we can reduce our individual carbon footprint, focus on which is a bit scammy by the industry heads who want to keep converting resources into money to swim in, so please also consider lobbying for stronger regulation of our collective carbon footprint.
Public luxury (libraries, health care, bike lanes, public transportation, education from birth onward that isn't about preparing obedient workers for the mill but reinforcing the benefits of mutual aid and participatory democracy), private sufficiency (I have enough. I actually have more than enough, and have spent about fifteen years getting rid of physical and digital baggage that gets in the way of good relationships, with an exponential increase in recent years, leveling out again as I scrape the barrel for more to let go of). There are so many of us on this planet- believing the lie that we can all be wealthy (in capitalist terms) will accelerate boom-bust-quit, and I don't see the Moon or Mars working out very well. We can be wealthy in social-animal terms, though, by being kind and loving and reciprocal. It's not that simple, nor will it ever not be a messy, dynamic situation, but there's a beauty to that.
> If you haven't already, consider quitting air travel altogether.
Most people travel by plane because it's the only way to reach their destination in a reasonable amount of time.
Let's start with corporations. You know, those that invented the term "carbon footprint" to redirect blame for climate change to consumers.
Funny, how we're all suddenly privy to highly classified information.
Yesterday, if you'd have publicly shared this one substation is enough to take down Heathrow for an entire day, you'd have been disappeared by the British spooks for sharing extremely sensitive information threatening national security and you'd probably end up behind bars for over a decade.
Today, we all just know because it happened to catch fire, exposing the flaw.
This kind of information has been available via open data for ages, and it isn't exactly hard for a foreign power with boots on the ground to figure out either.
With this kind of large-scale infrastructure it just isn't viable to rely on security through obscurity. If you want to protect against failure, invest in redundancy.
Sounds like a cost center. Heathrow is privately owned. Would the board approve?
Business continuity planning & investment is an important part of running an enterprise.
I didn’t mean this substation existing. I know that’s obviously not a secret. The fact taking it out takes out the entire main airport for at least an entire day is a different matter. Do you really think they’d have been fine with you announcing that to the world yesterday?
Don’t forget the BT Tower existing was technically classified under the official secrets act, even though it was extremely obviously there for everyone to see including on maps.
Taking out any power infrastructure is going to cause significant problems, no? I don't think that's a national secret in any country.
I get it, all modern intelligence apparatus is draconian but this take doesn't really make sense IMO.
There's "significant problems" and there's taking out *the* most important airport in the country. Yes, there are other airports but this one matters most. Both in terms of (inter)national perception and in terms of real damage to the economy.
From an US perspective it'd be like taking out JFK, LAX and ATL at the same time. But even then, it doesn't really compare.
What a weird take. Arresting someone for reporting a major security vulnerability is pretty shitty thing for a state to do. What you're suggesting is that that's not actually that bad.
Same sort of logic that leads to people getting arrested for looking at HTML and reporting that it includes passwords.
That’s what happened to Josh Renaud.
Renaud discovered that Social Security numbers for teachers, administrators and counselors were visible in the HTML code of a public Missouri State Education website and reported it.
Governor Mike Parson tried to file charges against him and labelled him as a criminal for doing so.
Yep! That's exactly what I was thinking of.
I've been on the side of disclosing a handful of times and it's a gamble each time whether I'm going to get a CFAA threat (both implicit and explicit threats).
> What you're suggesting is that that's not actually that bad.
When did I ever say or imply that? I agree that intelligence agencies are draconian, but to imply that you'd be locked away (never to be heard from again) for pointing out that a substation could be bombed and cause power issues is ridiculous.
They were using a bit of hyperbole for sure (though another poster accurately pointed out to you methods used against Northern Irish folk), but the reaction of gov agencies to use imprisonment (even as a threat!) for pointing out security fuckups isn't without precedence. It's happened to me :)
So, I guess I really don't understand your point. That being arrested for pointing these things out isn't bad because it's not being disappeared?
I shouldn’t have used the word disappeared, I just meant picked up. And yeah no, not for saying a substation exists and could be bombed.
But for saying there is a single substation that, if taken out (by sabotage, terror attack, arson, or whatever), would cause great embarrassment and economic damage to the country by disabling THE British Airport? I think that’s a whole different matter.
> we're all suddenly privy to highly classified information
Its not highly classified. Its not even plain classified.
Its available on streetmap. The substation (like most are) is located on the edge of a residential area / industrial estate. People walk and drive past it every day.
Looking at streetmap, there's even a multiple big signs outside that says "North Hyde Substation". They don't even make any effort to hide it with obscured fencing, its all out in the open.
As others have also pointed out, its in open data downloads for ages.
The fact this substation exists, yes, obviously. The fact taking it out takes out the entire airport: not so much! These kind of things usually aren’t dependent on a single substation. The fact that it is, is not something the UK government would have liked to be made public.
> The fact taking it out takes out the entire airport: not so much! These kind of things usually aren’t dependent on a single substation.
Let me re-phrase that for you:
It only took down the airport because the airport clearly did insufficient capacity planning in terms of backup mechanisms.
How can I be so confident ?
Because that exact same substation serves a number of large datacentres in the vicinity.
Due to the grid constraints previously discussed here, many of those same datacentres take ALL their feeds (A,B,C etc.) off that one substation, the only difference is the cables are diversely routed. Not their choice, it was imposed on them by the grid.
They have ALL been without ANY electrical feeds all day. I know that for a fact.
HOWEVER, those same datacentres have been running non-stop like nothing happened. I know that for a fact.
Why, because they have N+1 generators (which are regularly tested) with at least 48 hours of fuel, which was topped up this morning as soon as it became clear it was a major incident and with multiple fuel deliveries already pre-scheduled from multiple independent suppliers. I know that for a fact.
The grid are of course very busy trying to work some magic to re-arrange things to get the datacentres back online. Meanwhile the datacentres are very happy to keep ticking away on generator power for as long as it takes, its not a problem for them, its an event they plan, prepare and practice for.
Heathrow could have done the same. They could have added generator plants here and there over the years when they re-built terminals and such like.
They didn't, or at least they didn't do so with sufficient capacity.
Maybe Heathrow also fell behind on their generator maintenance and testing regimes. Who knows...
There are people out there who say it is because their motto is "spend little, charge a lot", so they did de-minimis, prefering to focus on maximising revenue generating space. I could not possibly comment.
Sure, no argument there, but the fact is there was a weakness there and a weakness that would be considered a threat to national security if it were to get out - before today
> weakness that would be considered a threat to national security if it were to get out - before today
If it was considered a "threat to national security", that substation site would have been much better secured.
In addition, if it was a "threat to national security", the site location would not be on open public databases, it would be on List X.
As it stands, the substation site "security" consists of two low, easily scalable, fences. And probably some CCTV. That's about it.
Security by obscurity is not security. We are in 2025, you have streetview and satellite photos.
Anybody who knows anything about electricity distribution could look at that substation and tell you it was pretty important given the large size of transformers located there.
It also doesn't take a rocket scientist to see Heathrow is minutes away and put two and two together.
And if you think the bad guys don't have the ability to give some poorly paid maintenance guy at the electricity company some cash in relation for extra detail, I've got an igloo to sell you.
> because it happened to catch fire
Not a conspiracy theorist here, but... there's been quite a few expensive things which caught fire in Europe in the past year and change and it turned out those things didn't catch it by accident.
An example from a few days ago is how Lithuania's government believes that the Russian military intelligence was behind an arson attack on an Ikea: https://www.euronews.com/2025/03/17/lithuania-says-russian-m...
There's also the "accident" that just happened to destroy a US military oil tanker. Sure enough, the captain of the ship was Russian: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/12/captain-arr...
And it's very clear that multiple undersea cables have been intentionally cut by Russia-linked entities. You just don't drag anchors for hours over known cables by accident (the cables are on charts precisely to help captains avoid damaging them).
We're at war with Russia, and these kinds of attacks have both economic and psychological harms. They also allow Russia to practice techniques in case they need to ramp things up for a hotter conflict.
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You don't get disappeared in UK. Stuff goes wrong, Gov does stupid things, so do police - but that's process/people being stupid, not institutionalized disappearances.
laughs in Northern Irish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_techniques
Yes. NI was different, and suffered the abuses and problems which come with internal conflict.
An Helicopter, has been running multiple 360 degrees rounds, around the whole perimeter of Heathrow for the last two hours or three hours.
I wonder if they are looking for something or somebody and there is more to this story. (click on the helicopter icon to see previous runs): https://www.flightradar24.com/GINTV/3990e5fc
It's the BBC's news helicopter, according to the first result of a Google search. It's very easy to make these searches, and not invent conspiratorial nonsense.
Flights just resumed...first landing: https://www.flightradar24.com/BAW71SK/39910df8
If it was a police helicopter you wouldn't see it on flightradar24.
That looks like a news reporting helicopter?