Heathrow Airport is shut until Friday night

[Ozgirl76]

And my husband is due to fly home to Australia on Friday evening. I predict chaos.
Airport is saying that people should not travel to Heathrow and should contact their airlines.

@quantumbutterfly

So you weren't living there on 9/11.

I don’t think LHR ground to a halt like this on/around 9/11, closest analogue to today’s events would probably be the mass UK airspace closure due to the Volcanic Ash cloud event back in ? 2010.

We are very far from an airport but under the flight path. The volcanic ash cloud we marvelled at how blue the sky was - no contrails.

Plus in covid. I recall getting very excited when I started seeing contrails again- sign of things getting back to normal.

From 9 tonight round at the A3, so when they are allowed to land again.

Yeah, but they like dead bodies. Russia has been sabotaging the west for a very long time now, by the back door, no dead bodies but the polonium tea one and the poisened umbrella or inconvenient Russians. They are trying us and Puting knows we are all a bunch of sissies who blanch at having our heating go down 1 degree and wouldn´t retaliate. The UK government has allowed Russia to murder people on UK soil and has looked the other way. Now it´s coming back to bite us. And by us, I mean the whole of Europe.

Given that local people were only cut off for an hour or so suggests that the power probably was restored to the airport, but as others have said the logistics need to be re-set before they can have angry passengers trooping through /until they can guarantee a robust service there is no point in rushing to ‘open’.
I live a short bus journey from Heathrow, but am travelling a lot at the moment and vastly prefer an hour drive and parking charges st Gatwick than going via Heathrow even at the best of times.

Just to add to the conspiracy theories 👀 if it's not Russia, you can imagine there are Russian bots jumping on popular U.K. talk sites to drop in the odd casual "it's Russia" "no it's not, it's just U.K.’s rubbish infrastructure, rubbish country" posts; and seize the opportunity of creating uncertainty and add to the illusion we're weak and feeble in the U.K.. 🤔

The skies were quiet, my lovely partner was on a boat under the Heathrow flight path in London with no radio or phone and wondering why no planes were going over.

There was a lot of speculation in the moment about how far and wide the targets might be and UK airspace was affected, and of course all flights to US were rerouted or cancelled.

The absence of noise is discomforting, like when noisy children suddenly go quiet.

Let’s give a shout out to all those who are working their backside off to get the issues fixed at the substation and airport.

let’s call for the person who removed diesel fuelled generators to be ‘green’ to be named and shamed.

maybe I’m over-simplifying this, but couldn’t they just plug in a back-up battery?

Yes, and the backup generator was destroyed as well as the main system.

Don't really need to be a genius to figure out what's going on here..

No that isn't really possible for a number if reasons. That battery would be comically big for a start .

This.

It's so weird to see people laughing it off as "conspiracy theorists" and "watching too many movies".

Woefully naive.

Yes to the first, no to the second (and no it wasn't me 😂).

I think you mean contingency planning.

I'm thinking hundreds of hamster wheels connected to turbines (very green), or we could get criminals in prison to do it !😶

I actually think that those that laugh it off, with stupid posts and way out suggestions, are those that are the most scared, but in denial.

Considering Sky News mixed up SAS the Scandinavian airline with the SAS special forces, I'd take anything they have to say with quite a large pinch of salt.

I agree.

It’s incredibly naive.

@quantumbutterfly

The skies were quiet, my lovely partner was on a boat under the Heathrow flight path in London with no radio or phone and wondering why no planes were going over.

OK, I may well be wrong but FWIW I was working for a Heathrow based airline at the time of 9/11 (on the day itself I was down route) and if LHR did close it wasn’t for long because we stayed on our planned rosters and got home on schedule, albeit with extra precautions on flights.

It was obviously much different Stateside where they had a complete ground stop for several days and as you say there were massive issues over the Atlantic.

The Volcanic Ash grounding was very much a complete stop…fortunately I was in leave for that gem.

Or perhaps Russian bots trying to lull you into a false sense of security. If you're worried then prep, hope for the best, prepare for the worst, keep calm and carry on. Realistically what else can you do?

Maybe if the conspiracy theorists weren't wrong again and again and again people would take them more seriously.

Anyone else remember the threads last July claiming that the global IT outage was absolutely definitely a Russian attack, and how it turned out to be an underpaid contractor pushing out a faulty CrowdStrike update on a Friday? I do.

Yep that was absolutely priceless, the initial report of SAS cancelling flights was even accompanied with an image the Regiment Badge…..

🙄

What's this about removing diesel fuelled generators? Heathrow said they all worked:
"...we have back-up diesel generators and uninterruptable power supplies in place, and they all operated as expected."

> If it was sabotage they would have taken down the air traffic control system or similar.

As you've probably seen, they did
The tower has its own generator, but the lights and radar are all taken down

@TheDevilWearPrimarni Redundancy planning is actually a very important part of aircraft safety (DH was an aircraft engineer) but it seems, at least in this case, that it does not necessarily extend to ground operations.