UK’s Heathrow defends decision to shut airport amid blame game

Updated by Faith Barbara N Ruhinda at 15:32 EAT on Monday 24 March 2025

Britain’s Heathrow defended its decision to shut down operations at Europe’s busiest airport on Friday as the blame game intensified over an 18-hour closure that coast airlines tens of millions of pounds and stranded thousands of passengers.

As questions mounted over how such a critical part of Britain’s infrastructure could fail and whether all Heathrow’s four terminals needed to shut, both National Grid and Heathrow agreed that the failure of the transformer was an unprecedented event.

But the airport was forced to defend its closure after the boss of National Grid told the Financial Times that the electricity transmission network remained capable of providing power to the airport throughout the crisis.

Heathrow said the fire at a nearby substation late on Thursday interrupted its operations, forcing it to shut while it reconfigured systems and switched to power from an alternative substation.

While airlines such as British Airways, the worse affected, add up the bill for the closure, the government and Heathrow have both commissioned reviews into what happened.

“Hundreds of critical systems across the airport were required to be safely powered down and then safely and systematically rebooted,” a Heathrow spokesperson said.

Heathrow is a private company owned by French investment group Ardian, Qatar Investment Authority and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund plus others.

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