British Airways has warned its services will be severely impacted over the coming days after the closure of London’s Heathrow Airport.
Chief executive Sean Doyle described the situation as “unprecedented,” with more than 100,000 of its customers on board some 670 flights being affected on Friday.
Europe’s busiest airport suffered a power outage after a fire broke out at a nearby electrical substation in Hayes, west London.
National Grid said an “interim solution” has been found to allow power to be restored and Heathrow said it is “safely able to begin some flights” later on Friday, but the airport expected significant disruption over the coming days.
In a video message to passengers on Friday afternoon, Doyle said British Airways had “been forced to effectively ground our flying operation” due to the incident, cancelling every short-haul and the majority of long-haul flights scheduled for Friday.
He said: “This is an unprecedented situation, and we have not seen a closure of Heathrow of this scale for many years.
“Unfortunately, it will have a huge impact on all of our customers flying with us over the coming days.
“Our colleagues are working extremely hard to support our customers with the most up to date information in a live and evolving situation.”
Doyle said the airline had extended opening times on its phone lines to help manage “as many customers as quickly as possible”, and it was providing regular updates on its website and app.
He went on: “We hope that power will be restored as soon as possible. But even when that does happen, this incident will have a substantial impact on our airline and customers for many days to come, with disruption to journeys expected over the coming days.
“To give you an idea of the scale of disruption we face which we’re working to minimise, today we were due to operate more than 670 flights carrying around 107,000 customers, with similar numbers planned over the weekend.”
The chief executive said further complexity was created by its plane crews only being legally allowed to operate for a certain number of hours, meaning new crews may need to be sent to the diverted locations where they landed.
British Airways also had no power for its engineering and maintenance operation but this is now being “addressed,” he said.
Doyle added: “I am sorry to everybody who’s experiencing this disruption and ask you for your understanding while we work to recover our operation from such a significant challenge which is complex to work through.
“Thank you to our customers for bearing with us and the thousands of our colleagues around the world for their hard work.”