Heathrow boss ‘annoyed’ for being asleep throughout hearth | EUROtoday

Heathrow’s boss has stated it was “frustrating” he slept by quite a few emergency telephone calls following a hearth in March that led to the airport’s closure and the cancellation of 1,300 flights.

Discussing the blaze at a close-by electrical substation which disrupted flights for 270,000 passengers, Thomas Woldbye stated it wasn’t usually the best way he acted.

“It’s not how I normally operate but on an operational level all the right things happened,” he instructed the BBC’s Today programme.

Mr Woldbye admitted that the ability outage would value “millions” however declined to specify how a lot.

Results from Heathrow revealed that pre-tax revenue fell by 37.2% to £203m within the first six months of 2025.

A assessment into the incident by former Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly discovered that Mr Woldbye missed two emergency notifications and “several” telephone calls on the evening of the fireplace and the next energy outage as a result of his cell phone had gone into “silent mode”.

In the early hours of 21 March, Heathrow took the choice to cease operations on the airport. Mr Woldbye grew to become conscious of what had occurred at round 6:45am.

He instructed the BBC he was happy with the disaster administration procedures that have been in place and went into motion whereas he was sleeping.

“Of course, an organisation like ours has to be able to manage whether the captain’s on the bridge or not and in this particular case we took the right decisions,” he stated.

An investigation into how the fireplace began at {an electrical} substation which provided energy to Heathrow found that it was the results of a identified fault on the web site.

National Grid, which owns the substation, had been conscious of an issue since 2018 however failed to repair it.

As the outcomes of the investigation have been revealed, Heathrow stated it was contemplating authorized motion towards National Grid.