Warren Who had just settled on a flight from New York to London and had planned to visit his girlfriend.
The plane carrying Hu, a New York university student, will return to the US, the crew announced. “I’m a bit surprised, but I’m trying to stay calm because I can find a solution,” he said in a text message from the plane.
A fire in an electric current near Heathrow knocked out power at the world’s busiest airport and forced authorities to close for everything on Friday. They warned that flight disruption could last for days.
A glance at Heathrow’s Flight Information Committee on Friday morning gave me a sense of how big the shock wave from the closure would be. Flights from Vietnam, Brunei and India were scheduled to land on Friday morning. Passengers were hoping to get planes to dozens of destinations, including Tokyo and Singapore, Minneapolis and Miami.
In China’s city of Shenzhen, Lucas Elephant was one of the travelers waiting for news about a now-lagged flight to London. Zou, who works for the trading company, said he learned about the Heathrow closure, just as he was trying to board a Deep Shenzhen Airlines flight, which is scheduled to depart at 1:45pm local time.
“I have a lot of luggage so I don’t know if I should laugh or cry. I have already booked a hotel room in London, but I can’t cancel it,” Zou said. He said Deep Shenzhen Airlines has arranged hotel rooms for affected passengers and their flights could be rescheduled at 2am.
Dozens of airlines fly to Heathrow from around 180 locations around the world. Many planes already in the air have been detoured to other airports.
As many as 290,000 passengers coming and going from Heathrow could be affected by the closure, according to aerial analytics firm Cirium. Flight 669 was scheduled to take off from Heathrow on Friday, Cirium said.
Heathrow is British Airways’ main hub and says it redirects flights on its way to Heathrow to other airports in the UK whenever possible.
At Rome’s Fiumicino airport, dozens of people lined up at the British Airways counter, hoping to learn about their flights. The airport’s intelligence committee indicated that four British Airways flights had been cancelled on Friday morning.
A group of high school students from Arizona are planning to return home in Italy via Heathrow in a week, and have arrived at Fiumicino due to disappointment. “We didn’t know that the flight had been cancelled until half of our party checked in,” said Angel Brady, the travel chaperone. She said the group would miss a connecting flight to Phoenix.
Airlines in North America, Asia and Australia were also affected. American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Air Canada and JetBlue were people who had to deflect Heathrow-bound jets or return them to the airports they came from.
Singapore Airlines said the flight departing for Heathrow at 9am local time on Friday has returned to Singapore, with five flights to London cancelled on Friday.
Qantas, Australia, detoured two heathrow-bound flights to Paris.
Nicholas Yong contributed to the report from Singapore.
