LONDON: London’s Heathrow Airport resumed full operations on Saturday, a day after a fire knocked out its power supply and shut Europe’s busiest airport, causing global travel chaos.
Some flights were canceled or delayed as the travel industry scrambled to reroute passengers and fix battered airline schedules after the huge fire at an electrical substation serving the airport.
Resumed flights had begun on Friday evening, but the shuttering of the world’s fifth-busiest airport for most of the day left tens of thousands searching for scarce hotel rooms and replacement seats while airlines tried to return jets and crew to bases.
Operations were normal on Saturday morning, but airlines were still dealing with the aftermath, said the airport’s chief executive, Thomas Woldbye.
“We don’t expect any major amount of flights to be canceled or delayed. There are some cancelations and there are some delays. We are handling them in the same way as we would normally do,” Woldbye told BBC radio.
The vast majority of scheduled morning flights departed successfully on Saturday morning, with a handful of delays and cancelations, Heathrow’s departures website showed.
British Airways, whose main hub is Heathrow, said it expected around 85 percent of its schedule of almost 600 departures and arrivals to proceed on Saturday.
“We are planning to operate as many flights as possible to and from Heathrow on Saturday, but to recover an operation of our size after such a significant incident is extremely complex,” the airline said in a statement.
“It is likely that all traveling customers will experience delays as we continue to navigate the challenges posed by Friday’s power outage at the airport.”
A Heathrow spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the airport had “hundreds of additional colleagues on hand in our terminals and we have added flights to today’s schedule to facilitate an extra 10,000 passengers traveling through the airport.”
The travel industry, facing the prospect of a financial hit costing tens of millions of pounds and a likely fight over who should pay, questioned how such crucial infrastructure could fail without backup.
“It is a clear planning failure by the airport,” said Willie Walsh, head of global airlines body IATA, who, as former head of British Airways, has for years been a fierce critic of the crowded hub.
Police said that after an initial assessment they were not treating the incident as suspicious, although enquiries remained ongoing. London Fire Brigade said its investigations would focus on the electrical distribution equipment.
The airport had been due to handle 1,351 flights on Friday, flying up to 291,000 passengers, but planes were diverted to other airports in Britain and across Europe, while many long-haul flights returned to their point of departure.
Woldbye, asked on Friday who would pay for the disruption, said there were “procedures in place,” adding “we don’t have liabilities in place for incidents like this.”
Restrictions on overnight flights were temporarily lifted by Britain’s Department of Transport to ease congestion, but British Airways Chief Executive Sean Doyle said the closure was set to have a “huge impact on all of our customers flying with us over the coming days.”
Virgin Atlantic said it expected to operate “a near full schedule” with limited cancelations on Saturday but that the situation remained dynamic and all flights would be kept under continuous review.
Airlines including JetBlue, American Airlines, Air Canada, Air India, Delta Air Lines, Qantas, United Airlines, British Airways and Virgin were diverted or returned to their origin airports in the wake of the closure, according to data from flight analytics firm Cirium.
Shares in many airlines fell on Friday.
Aviation experts said the last time European airports experienced disruption on such a large scale was the 2010 Icelandic volcanic ash cloud that grounded some 100,000 flights.
They warned that some passengers forced to land in Europe may have to stay in transit lounges if they lack the paperwork to leave the airport.
Prices at hotels around Heathrow jumped, with booking sites offering rooms for 500 pounds ($645), roughly five times the normal price levels.
Police said after an initial assessment, they were not treating the incident at the power substation as suspicious, although enquiries remained ongoing. London Fire Brigade said its investigations would focus on the electrical distribution equipment.
Heathrow and London’s other major airports have been hit by other outages in recent years, most recently by an automated gate failure and an air traffic system meltdown, both in 2023.
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Heathrow resumes operations as global airlines scramble after shutdown
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Heathrow resumes operations as global airlines scramble after shutdown
- Some flights were canceled or delayed as the travel industry scrambled to reroute passengers and fix battered airline schedules
- Operations were normal on Saturday morning, but airlines were still dealing with the aftermath, said the airport’s chief executive
Trump targets non-white immigrants in renewed xenophobic rants
WASHINGTON: Back in 2018, President Donald Trump disputed having used the epithet “shithole” to describe some countries whose citizens emigrated to the United States.
Nowadays, he embraces it and pushes his anti-immigrant and xenophobic tirades even further.
Case in point: during a rally in the northeastern state of Pennsylvania on Wednesday that was supposed to focus on his economic policy, the 79-year-old Republican openly ranted and reused the phrase that had sparked an outcry during his first term.
“We had a meeting and I said, ‘Why is it we only take people from shithole countries,’ right? ‘Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden?’” Trump told his cheering audience.
“But we always take people from Somalia,” he continued. “Places that are a disaster. Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”
Recently, he called Somali immigrants “trash.”
These comments are “more proof of his racist, anti-immigrant agenda,” Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey responded on X.
The Trump megaphone
Florida Republican lawmaker Randy Fine, on the other hand, defended Trump.
“Not all cultures are equal and not all countries are equal,” he said on CNN, adding “the president speaks in language that Americans understand, he is blunt.”
University of Albany history professor Carl Bon Tempo told AFP this type of anti-immigrant rhetoric has long thrived on the far-right.
“The difference is now it’s coming directly out of the White House,” he said, adding “there’s no bigger megaphone” in American politics.
On the campaign trail in 2023, Trump told a rally in New Hampshire that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” — a remark that drew comparisons to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Now back in power, Trump’s administration has launched a sweeping and brutal deportation campaign and suspended immigration applications from nationals of 19 of the poorest countries on the planet.
Simultaneously, the president ordered white South African farmers to be admitted to the US, claiming their persecution.
No filter left
“Any filter he might have had is gone,” Terri Givens, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada and immigration policy expert, told AFP.
For Trump, it doesn’t matter whether an immigrant obeys the law, or owns a business, or has been here for decades, according to Syracuse University political science professor Mark Brockway.
“They are caught in the middle of Trump’s fight against an invented evil enemy,” Brockway told AFP.
By describing some immigrants as “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” — as Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem did earlier this month — the White House is designating a target other than itself for American economic ire at a time when the cost of living has gone up and fears are growing over job security and loss of federal benefits.
But, Bon Tempo noted, “when immigration spikes as an issue, it spikes because of economics sometimes, but it also spikes because of these larger sort of foundational questions about what it means to be an American.”
On November 28, after an Afghan national attacked two National Guard soldiers in Washington, Trump took to his Truth Social network to call for “REVERSE MIGRATION.”
This notion, developed by European far-right theorists such as French writer Renaud Camus, refers to the mass expulsion of foreigners deemed incapable of assimilation.
Digging into the “Make America Great Again” belief system, many experts have noted echoes of the “nativist” current of politics from the 1920s in the US, which held that white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture was the true American identity.
That stance led to immigration policies favoring Northern and Western Europe.
As White House senior adviser Stephen Miller recently wrote on X: “This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies...At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
aue/sla/iv
Nowadays, he embraces it and pushes his anti-immigrant and xenophobic tirades even further.
Case in point: during a rally in the northeastern state of Pennsylvania on Wednesday that was supposed to focus on his economic policy, the 79-year-old Republican openly ranted and reused the phrase that had sparked an outcry during his first term.
“We had a meeting and I said, ‘Why is it we only take people from shithole countries,’ right? ‘Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden?’” Trump told his cheering audience.
“But we always take people from Somalia,” he continued. “Places that are a disaster. Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”
Recently, he called Somali immigrants “trash.”
These comments are “more proof of his racist, anti-immigrant agenda,” Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey responded on X.
The Trump megaphone
Florida Republican lawmaker Randy Fine, on the other hand, defended Trump.
“Not all cultures are equal and not all countries are equal,” he said on CNN, adding “the president speaks in language that Americans understand, he is blunt.”
University of Albany history professor Carl Bon Tempo told AFP this type of anti-immigrant rhetoric has long thrived on the far-right.
“The difference is now it’s coming directly out of the White House,” he said, adding “there’s no bigger megaphone” in American politics.
On the campaign trail in 2023, Trump told a rally in New Hampshire that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” — a remark that drew comparisons to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Now back in power, Trump’s administration has launched a sweeping and brutal deportation campaign and suspended immigration applications from nationals of 19 of the poorest countries on the planet.
Simultaneously, the president ordered white South African farmers to be admitted to the US, claiming their persecution.
No filter left
“Any filter he might have had is gone,” Terri Givens, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada and immigration policy expert, told AFP.
For Trump, it doesn’t matter whether an immigrant obeys the law, or owns a business, or has been here for decades, according to Syracuse University political science professor Mark Brockway.
“They are caught in the middle of Trump’s fight against an invented evil enemy,” Brockway told AFP.
By describing some immigrants as “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” — as Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem did earlier this month — the White House is designating a target other than itself for American economic ire at a time when the cost of living has gone up and fears are growing over job security and loss of federal benefits.
But, Bon Tempo noted, “when immigration spikes as an issue, it spikes because of economics sometimes, but it also spikes because of these larger sort of foundational questions about what it means to be an American.”
On November 28, after an Afghan national attacked two National Guard soldiers in Washington, Trump took to his Truth Social network to call for “REVERSE MIGRATION.”
This notion, developed by European far-right theorists such as French writer Renaud Camus, refers to the mass expulsion of foreigners deemed incapable of assimilation.
Digging into the “Make America Great Again” belief system, many experts have noted echoes of the “nativist” current of politics from the 1920s in the US, which held that white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture was the true American identity.
That stance led to immigration policies favoring Northern and Western Europe.
As White House senior adviser Stephen Miller recently wrote on X: “This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies...At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
aue/sla/iv
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