Airline 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.
Some airlines such as United Airlines and Air Canada said they expected flights to be able to depart for Heathrow late on Friday, to arrive on Saturday morning, and eight long-haul BA flights will leave Heathrow on Friday evening.
But it will be some time before passenger services return to normal as staff and planes will now be out of position.
British Airways, the biggest carrier at Heathrow which had 341 flights scheduled to land there on Friday, said the situation was unprecedented.
"We have flight and cabin crew colleagues and planes that are currently at locations where we weren’t planning on them to be," British Airways Chief Executive Sean Doyle told reporters.
"Unfortunately, it will have a huge impact on all of our customers flying with us over the coming days."
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in many airlines, including U.S. carriers, fell.
The fire brigade said the cause of the fire was not known, but that 25,000 litres of cooling oil in the substation's transformer had caught fire. By morning the transformer could be seen smouldering, doused in white firefighting foam.
Passengers stranded in London and facing the prospect of days of disruptions were scrambling to make alternate travel arrangements.
"It's pretty stressful," Robyn Autry, 39, a professor, who had been due to fly home to New York. "I'm worried about how much is it going to cost me to fix this."
Industry experts 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.
A WAKE-UP CALL
Airline executives, electrical engineers and passengers questioned how Britain's gateway to the world could be forced to close by one fire, however large.
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.
Pictures on social media showed the airport terminals in near darkness during the night, and British energy minister Ed Miliband said it appeared that the "catastrophic" fire had prevented the power back-up system from working.
Philip Ingram, a former intelligence officer in the British military, said Heathrow's inability to keep operating exposed vulnerability in Britain's critical national infrastructure.
"It is a wake-up call," he told Reuters. "There is no way that Heathrow should be taken out completely because of a failure in one power substation."
Willie Walsh, the head of the global airlines body IATA and a former head of British Airways, said Heathrow had once again let passengers down.
"How is it that critical infrastructure - of national and global importance - is totally dependent on a single power source without an alternative," he said.
Heathrow said it had diesel generators and uninterruptible power supplies in place to land aircraft and evacuate passengers safely. Those systems all operated as expected. But with the airport consuming as much energy as a small city, it said it could not run all its operations safely on back-up systems.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer's spokesman said there were questions to answer about how the incident occurred and there would be a thorough investigation.
Source: Reuters