Planes begin to land at airport but airlines said the closure would continue to have a ‘huge impact’ on passengers in the coming days

Willie Walsh, the International Air Transport Association’s director general, criticised Heathrow airport in as a result of the disruption, reports the PA news agency.

“This is yet another case of Heathrow letting down both travellers and airlines,” he said. Walsh added:

From that arises the question of who bears the costs of taking care of disrupted travellers.

We must find a fairer allocation of passenger care costs than airlines alone picking up the tab when infrastructure fails. Until that happens, Heathrow has very little incentive to improve.”

I’d like to stress that this has been an incident of major severity. It’s not a small fire.

We have lost power equal to that of a mid-sized city and our backup systems have been working as they should but they are not sized to run the entire airport.”

You can say that but of course contingencies of certain sizes we cannot guard ourselves against 100% and this is one of them.

This has been a major incident. I mean, short of anybody getting hurt, this is as big as it gets for our airport and we are actually coming back quite fast I would say, when you consider the amount of systems that we have to shut down then bring back up and make sure that they’re safe.”

This is unprecedented. It’s never happened before and that’s why I’m saying it has been a major incident.”