Heathrow says some flights will resume after a fire cut power to Europe’s busiest airport

Heathrow says some flights will resume after a fire cut power to Europe’s busiest airport
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A plane lands at Gatwick airport, south London, on Mar. 21, 2025 following the closure of Heathrow airport after a fire broke out at a substation supplying power of the airport. (AFP)
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Updated 21 March 2025
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Heathrow says some flights will resume after a fire cut power to Europe’s busiest airport

Heathrow says some flights will resume after a fire cut power to Europe’s busiest airport
  • The London airport said it would begin flights for passengers stranded when their flights were diverted to other airports in Europe and to get airplanes back in the right place
  • At least 1,350 flights to and from Heathrow were affected, flight tracking service FlightRadar 24 said

LONDON: Heathrow Airport said it planned to resume some flights Friday after a large fire at an electrical substation knocked out power to Europe’s busiest flight hub and disrupted global travel for hundreds of thousands of passengers.
The London airport said it would begin flights for passengers stranded when their flights were diverted to other airports in Europe and to get airplanes back in the right place. It hopes to be in full operation on Saturday.
At least 1,350 flights to and from Heathrow were affected, flight tracking service FlightRadar 24 said, and the impact was likely to last several days as passengers try to reschedule their travel and airlines work to get planes and crew to the right places.
Authorities do not know what caused the fire but so far found have no evidence it was suspicious.
Residents in west London described hearing a large explosion, followed by a fireball and clouds of smoke, when the blaze ripped through the electrical substation near the airport.
Some 120 flights were in the air when the closure was announced, with some turned around and others diverted to Gatwick Airport outside London, Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris or Ireland’s Shannon Airport, tracking services showed.
Lawrence Hayes was three-quarters of the way to London from New York when Virgin Atlantic announced they were being diverted to Glasgow.
“It was a red-eye flight and I’d already had a full day, so I don’t even know how long I’ve been up for,” Hayes told the BBC as he was getting off the plane in Scotland. “Luckily I managed to get hold of my wife and she’s kindly booked me a train ticket to get back to Euston, but it’s going to be an incredibly long day.”
Heathrow is one of the world’s busiest airports for international travel. It had its busiest January on record earlier this year, with more than 6.3 million passengers, up more than 5 percent from the same period last year.
Still, the disruption Friday fell short of the one caused by the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed clouds of ash into the atmosphere and created trans-Atlantic air travel chaos for months.
Unclear what caused the fire but foul play not suspected
It was too early to determine what sparked the huge blaze about 2 miles (3 kilometers) from the airport, but there’s “no suggestion” of foul play, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said.
The Metropolitan Police force said counterterrorism detectives were leading the investigation because of their ability to find the cause quickly and because of the location of the electrical substation fire and its impact on critical national infrastructure.
Heathrow said its backup power supply designed for emergencies worked as expected, but it was not enough to run the whole airport. It said it had no choice but to close the airport for the day.
“We expect significant disruption over the coming days, and passengers should not travel to the airport under any circumstances until the airport reopens,” the airport said.
The widespread impact of the fire that took seven hours to control led to criticism that Britain was ill prepared for disaster or some type of attack if a single blaze could shut down Europe’s busiest airport.
“The UK’s critical national infrastructure is not sufficiently hardened for anywhere near the level it would need to be at to give us confidence this won’t happen again,” said Alan Mendoza, the executive director of the Henry Jackson Society, a security think tank. “If one fire can shut down Heathrow’s primary systems and then apparently the backup systems, as well, it tells you something’s badly wrong with our system of management of such disasters.”
Tom Wells, a spokesperson for Prime Minister Keir Starmer, acknowledged that authorities had questions to answer and said a rigorous investigation was needed to make sure “this scale of disruption does not happen again.”
Heathrow — where the UK government plans to build a third runway — was at the heart of a shorter disruption in 2023 when Britain’s air traffic control system was hit by a breakdown that slowed takeoffs and landings across the UK on one of the busiest travel days of the year.
Disruption could last days
Heathrow had said it expected to reopen Saturday, but that it anticipated “significant disruption over the coming days and passengers should not travel to the airport under any circumstances until the airport reopens.”
Even after the airport reopens, it will take several days to mobilize planes, cargo carriers, and crews and rebook passengers, said aviation consultant Anita Mendiratta.
“It’s not only about resuming with tomorrow’s flights, it’s the backlog and the implications that have taken place,” she said. “Crew and aircraft, many are not where they’re supposed to be right now. So the recalculation of this is going to be intense.”
The London Fire Brigade sent 10 engines and around 70 firefighters to control the blaze and about 150 people were evacuated from their homes near the power station.
Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks said in a post on X the power outage affected more than 16,300 homes.
Diverted, canceled and in limbo
At Heathrow, a family of five traveling to Dallas showed up in the hopes their flight home — still listed as delayed — would take off.
But when Andrea Sri brought her brother, sister-in-law and their three children to the airport, they were told by police that there would be no flight.
“It was a waste of time. Very confusing,” said Sri, who lives in London. “We tried to get in touch with British Airways, but they don’t open their telephone line until 8 a.m.”
Travelers who were diverted to other cities found themselves trying to book travel onward to London. Qantas airlines sent flights from Singapore and Perth, Australia, to Paris, where it said it would bus people to London, a process likely to also include a train shuttle beneath the English Channel.
Budget airline Ryanair, which doesn’t operate out of Heathrow, said it added eight “rescue flights” between Dublin and Stansted, another London airport, to transport stranded passengers Friday and Saturday.
National Rail canceled all trains to and from the airport.
Blaze lit up the sky and darkened homes
Matthew Muirhead was working Thursday night near Heathrow when he stepped outside with a colleague and noticed smoke rising from an electrical substation and heard sirens crying out.
“We saw a bright flash of white, and all the lights in town went out,” he said.
Flights normally begin landing and taking off at Heathrow at 6 a.m. due to nighttime flying restrictions. But the skies were silent Friday morning.
“Living near Heathrow is noisy, there are planes every 90 seconds or so, plus the constant hum of traffic, but you get used to it, to the point of no longer noticing,” said James Henderson, who has lived next to the airport for more than 20 years. “Today is different, you can hear the birds singing.”


UK renationalizes first train operator under Labour reforms

Updated 2 sec ago
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UK renationalizes first train operator under Labour reforms

UK renationalizes first train operator under Labour reforms
LONDON: A private train operator servicing parts of southern England, including London, on Sunday became the first to be returned to public ownership under a government plan to renationalize Britain’s much-maligned railways.
All UK rail operators are due to be renationalized within the next two years in a key policy launched by Prime Minister Keir Starmer following his Labour party’s return to government last July after 14 years in opposition.
“South Western Railway is now under public ownership. And this is just the start,” Starmer said on X, formerly Twitter, naming the service kickstarting his government’s plan.
He vowed the renationalization “will put passengers first,” with “better services, with simpler ticketing, on more comfortable trains.”
Train passengers in Britain suffer from frequent cancelations, in addition to high ticket prices and regular confusion over which services they can be used on.
The privatization of rail operations took place in the mid-1990s under the Conservative prime minister of the time, John Major, but the rail network remained public, run by Network Rail.
Four of the 14 operators in England are already run by the state owing to poor performance in recent years, but this was originally meant to be a temporary fix before a return to the private sector.
Labour triumphed over the Conservative party in elections last year, with its manifesto including promises to fix the country’s ailing transport services.
Legislation was approved in November to bring rail operators into public ownership when the private companies’ contracts expire — or sooner in the event of poor management — and be managed by “Great British Railways.”
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said in a statement that will end “30 years of fragmentation,” but warned that “change isn’t going to happen overnight.”


“We’ve always been clear that public ownership isn’t a silver bullet, but we are really firing this starting gun in that race for a truly 21st-century railway, and that does mean refocusing away from private profit and toward the public good,” she added.
In an example of how passengers might not immediately notice much difference, South Western’s first service under public ownership on Sunday was set to include a rail replacement bus because of engineering work.
Government figures show that the equivalent of four percent of train services in Britain were canceled in the year to April 26.
The rate was three percent for South Western.
Rail unions — which have staged a stream of strikes in recent years over pay and conditions due to a cost-of-living crisis — welcomed the state takeover.
“We’re delighted that Britain’s railways are being brought back where they belong — into the public sector,” said Mick Whelan, general secretary of union Aslef.
“Everyone in the rail industry knows that privatization... didn’t, and doesn’t, work,” he added.
Two operators serving towns and cities in southeastern and eastern England are next to be brought back into public ownership by late 2025.
All the current contracts are set to expire by 2027.
UK media reported that the renationalization of South Western means a third of journeys are now on publicly owned services.
The government has said renationalization will save up to £150 million ($200 million) per year because it will no longer have to pay compensation fees to rail operators.
The main rail operators in Scotland and Wales, where transport policy is handled by the devolved administrations in Edinburgh and Cardiff, are also state-owned.

UK renationalizes first train operator under Labour reforms

Updated 2 min 49 sec ago
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UK renationalizes first train operator under Labour reforms

UK renationalizes first train operator under Labour reforms
LONDON: A private train operator servicing parts of southern England, including London, on Sunday became the first to be returned to public ownership under a government plan to renationalize Britain’s much-maligned railways.
All UK rail operators are due to be renationalized within the next two years in a key policy launched by Prime Minister Keir Starmer following his Labour party’s return to government last July after 14 years in opposition.
“South Western Railway is now under public ownership. And this is just the start,” Starmer said on X, formerly Twitter, naming the service kickstarting his government’s plan.
He vowed the renationalization “will put passengers first,” with “better services, with simpler ticketing, on more comfortable trains.”
Train passengers in Britain suffer from frequent cancelations, in addition to high ticket prices and regular confusion over which services they can be used on.
The privatization of rail operations took place in the mid-1990s under the Conservative prime minister of the time, John Major, but the rail network remained public, run by Network Rail.
Four of the 14 operators in England are already run by the state owing to poor performance in recent years, but this was originally meant to be a temporary fix before a return to the private sector.
Labour triumphed over the Conservative party in elections last year, with its manifesto including promises to fix the country’s ailing transport services.
Legislation was approved in November to bring rail operators into public ownership when the private companies’ contracts expire — or sooner in the event of poor management — and be managed by “Great British Railways.”
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said in a statement that will end “30 years of fragmentation,” but warned that “change isn’t going to happen overnight.”


“We’ve always been clear that public ownership isn’t a silver bullet, but we are really firing this starting gun in that race for a truly 21st-century railway, and that does mean refocusing away from private profit and toward the public good,” she added.
In an example of how passengers might not immediately notice much difference, South Western’s first service under public ownership on Sunday was set to include a rail replacement bus because of engineering work.
Government figures show that the equivalent of four percent of train services in Britain were canceled in the year to April 26.
The rate was three percent for South Western.
Rail unions — which have staged a stream of strikes in recent years over pay and conditions due to a cost-of-living crisis — welcomed the state takeover.
“We’re delighted that Britain’s railways are being brought back where they belong — into the public sector,” said Mick Whelan, general secretary of union Aslef.
“Everyone in the rail industry knows that privatization... didn’t, and doesn’t, work,” he added.
Two operators serving towns and cities in southeastern and eastern England are next to be brought back into public ownership by late 2025.
All the current contracts are set to expire by 2027.
UK media reported that the renationalization of South Western means a third of journeys are now on publicly owned services.
The government has said renationalization will save up to £150 million ($200 million) per year because it will no longer have to pay compensation fees to rail operators.
The main rail operators in Scotland and Wales, where transport policy is handled by the devolved administrations in Edinburgh and Cardiff, are also state-owned.

Trump ‘open’ to meeting Ukraine, Russia leaders to push ceasefire

Trump ‘open’ to meeting Ukraine, Russia leaders to push ceasefire
Updated 03 June 2025
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Trump ‘open’ to meeting Ukraine, Russia leaders to push ceasefire

Trump ‘open’ to meeting Ukraine, Russia leaders to push ceasefire
  • Russia will only agree a full ceasefire if Ukrainian troops pull back entirely from four regions — Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson

ISTANBUL: US President Donald Trump is “open” to meeting his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts in Turkiye, the White House said, after the two sides failed on Monday to make headway toward an elusive ceasefire.
Delegations from both sides did, however, agree another large-scale prisoner exchange in their meeting in Istanbul, which in mid-May also hosted their first round of face-to-face talks.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan proposed that Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Trump come together for a third round later this month in either Istanbul or Ankara.
Putin has so far refused such a meeting. But Zelensky has said he is willing, underlining that key issues can only be resolved at leaders-level.
Trump, who wants a swift end to the three-year war, is “open” to a three-way summit “if it comes to that, but he wants both of these leaders and both sides to come to the table together,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in Washington.
But despite Trump’s willingness to meet with Putin and Zelensky, no US representative took part in Monday’s talks in Istanbul, according to a State Department spokesperson.
Zelensky said that, “We are very much awaiting strong steps from the United States” and urged Trump to toughen sanctions on Russia to “push” it to agree to a full ceasefire.
In Monday’s meeting, Ukraine said that Moscow had rejected its call for an unconditional ceasefire. It offered instead a partial truce of two to three days in some areas of the frontline.
Russia will only agree a full ceasefire if Ukrainian troops pull back entirely from four regions — Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — according to its negotiating terms reported on by Russian state media. Russia currently only partly controls those regions.
Moscow has also demanded a ban on Kyiv joining NATO, limiting Ukraine’s military and ending Western military support.
Top negotiators from both sides agreed to swap all severely wounded soldiers and captured fighters under the age of 25.
Russia’s lead negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said it would involve “at least 1,000” on each side.
The two sides also agreed to hand over the bodies of 6,000 soldiers, Ukraine said after the talks.
“The Russian side continued to reject the motion of an unconditional ceasefire,” Ukraine’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergiy Kyslytsya told reporters after the talks.
Russia said it had offered a limited pause in fighting.
“We have proposed a specific ceasefire for two to three days in certain areas of the front line,” Medinsky said, adding that this was needed to collect the bodies of dead soldiers from the battlefield.
Zelensky hit back on social media: “I think ‘idiots’, because the whole point of a ceasefire is to stop people from becoming dead in the first place.”
Kyiv said it would study a document the Russian side handed its negotiators outlining its demands for both peace and a full ceasefire.
Zelensky said after the Istanbul talks concluded that any deal for lasting peace must not “reward” Putin, and has called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire to cover combat on air, sea and land.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, who led his country’s delegation, called for a next meeting to take place before the end of June. He also said a Putin-Zelensky summit should be discussed.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said after the talks — inside a luxury hotel on the banks of the Bosphorus — that they were held “in a constructive atmosphere.”
“During the meeting, the parties decided to continue preparations for a possible meeting at the leader level,” Fidan said on social media.
Tens of thousands have been killed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with swathes of eastern and southern Ukraine destroyed and millions forced to flee their homes in Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II.
In the front-line town of Dobropillya in eastern Ukraine, 53-year-old Volodymyr told AFP he had no hope left for an end to the conflict.
“We thought that everything would stop. And now there is nothing to wait for. We have no home, nothing. We were almost killed by drones,” he said.
After months of setbacks for Kyiv’s military, Ukraine said it had carried out an audacious attack on Sunday, smuggling drones into Russia and then firing them at air bases, damaging around 40 strategic Russian bombers worth $7 billion in a major special operation.


US commerce secretary expects India trade deal soon

US commerce secretary expects India trade deal soon
Updated 03 June 2025
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US commerce secretary expects India trade deal soon

US commerce secretary expects India trade deal soon

WASHINGTON: US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Monday voiced optimism for a trade deal soon with India to avoid tariffs threatened by President Donald Trump.
“You should expect a deal between the United States and India in the not too distant future,” he told the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum, which promotes relations between the two countries, calling himself “very optimistic.”
Trump has set a delayed deadline of July 9 for countries to avoid sweeping tariffs, as he seeks to shake up the global economy to correct what he says is unfairness to the United States.
Lutnick, a strong advocate of tariffs, said he was a “great fan” of India — but voiced longstanding concern about the emerging economy’s use of tariffs.
On tariff negotiations with India, “bringing them down to a level that is reasonable and appropriate so we can be great trading partners with each other, I think is absolutely on the table,” Lutnick said.
“There were certain things that the Indian government did that generally rubbed the United States the wrong way. For instance, they generally buy military gear from Russia,” he said.
But he said that Trump believed in raising concerns and “the Indian government is addressing it specifically and directly.”


Top Trump officials visit prolific Alaska oil field amid push to expand drilling

Top Trump officials visit prolific Alaska oil field amid push to expand drilling
Updated 03 June 2025
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Top Trump officials visit prolific Alaska oil field amid push to expand drilling

Top Trump officials visit prolific Alaska oil field amid push to expand drilling
  • For years, state leaders have dreamed of such a project but cost concerns, shifts in direction, competition and questions about economic feasibility have hindered progress

DEADHORSE, Alaska: President Donald Trump wants to double the amount of oil coursing through Alaska’s vast pipeline system and build a massive natural gas project as its “big, beautiful twin,” a top administration official said Monday while touring a prolific oil field near the Arctic Ocean.
The remarks by US Energy Secretary Chris Wright came as he and two other Trump Cabinet members — Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin — visited Prudhoe Bay as part of a multiday trip aimed at highlighting Trump’s push to expand oil and gas drilling, mining and logging in the state that drew criticism from environmentalists.
During the trip, Burgum’s agency also announced plans to repeal Biden-era restrictions on future leasing and industrial development in portions of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska that are designated as special for their wildlife, subsistence or other values.
The petroleum reserve is west of Prudhoe Bay and Deadhorse, the industrial encampment near the starting point of the trans-Alaska pipeline system. The pipeline, which runs for 800 miles (nearly 1,300 kilometers), has been Alaska’s economic lifeline for nearly 50 years.
Government and industry representatives several Asian countries, including Japan, were expected to join a portion of the US officials’ trip, as Trump has focused renewed attention on the gas project proposal, which in its current iteration would provide gas to Alaska residents and ship liquefied natural gas overseas. Matsuo Takehiko, vice minister for International Affairs at Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, was among those at Prudhoe Bay on Monday.
For years, state leaders have dreamed of such a project but cost concerns, shifts in direction, competition and questions about economic feasibility have hindered progress. US tariff talks with Asian countries have been seen as possible leverage for the Trump administration to secure investments in the proposed gas project.
Oil and natural gas are in significant demand worldwide, Wright told a group of officials and pipeline employees in safety hats and vests who gathered near the oil pipeline on a blustery day with 13-degree Fahrenheit (-10 Celsius) windchills. The pipeline stretched out over the snow-covered landscape.
“You have the big two right here,” he said. “Let’s double oil production, build the big, beautiful twin, and we will help energize the world and we will strengthen our country and strengthen our families.”
Oil flow through the trans-Alaska pipeline peaked at about 2 million barrels in the late 1980s. In 2011 — a year in which an average of about 583,000 barrels of oil a day flowed through the pipeline, then-Gov. Sean Parnell, a Republican, set a goal of boosting that number to 1 million barrels a day within a decade. It’s never come close in the years since: last year, throughput averaged about 465,000 barrels a day.
The Trump officials were joined Monday by a group that included US Sen. Dan Sullivan and Gov. Mike Dunleavy, both Republicans, who also took part in meetings Sunday in Anchorage and Utqiagvik.
In Utqiagvik, an Arctic community that experiences 24 hours of daylight at this time of year, many Alaska Native leaders support Trump’s push for more drilling in the petroleum reserve and to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil development. They lauded the visit after lamenting that they felt ignored by former President Joe Biden’s administration.
Alaska political leaders have long complained about perceived federal overreach by the US government, which oversees about 60 percent of lands in Alaska. Sullivan, Dunleavy and Alaska’s senior US senator, Lisa Murkowski, often complained that Biden’s team was too restrictive in its approach to many resource development issues.
Murkowski, an at-times vocal critic of Trump, joined for the Sunday meeting in Anchorage, where she said Alaska leaders “want to partner with you. We want to be that equal at the table instead of an afterthought.”
Environmentalists criticized Interior’s planned rollback of restrictions in portions of the petroleum reserve. While Sullivan called the repeal a top priority, saying Congress intended to have development in the petroleum reserve, environmentalists maintain that the law balances allowances for oil drilling with a need to provide protections for sensitive areas and decried Interior’s plans as wrong-headed.
Erik Grafe, an attorney with Earthjustice, called the Trump administration’s intense focus on oil and gas troubling, particularly in a state experiencing the real-time impacts of climate change. He called the continued pursuit of fossil fuel development “very frustrating and heartbreaking to see.”
The Interior Department said it will accept public comment on the planned repeal.
The three Trump officials also plan to speak at Dunleavy’s annual energy conference Tuesday in Anchorage.