Heathrow Airport’s boss has said it was “frustrating” that he slept through numerous emergency phone calls following a fire in March that led to the airport’s closure and the cancellation of 1,300 flights.
In his first interview since the release of a report into the fire at a nearby electrical substation, Thomas Woldbye said it wasn’t typically the way he acted.
“It’s not how I normally operate, but on an operational level, all the right things happened,” he told the BBC’s Today programme.
Mr Woldbye admitted that the power outage, which disrupted flights for 270,000 passengers, would cost “millions” but declined to specify how much.
Results from Heathrow revealed that pre-tax profit fell by 37.2% to £203m in the first six months of 2025.
A review into the incident by former Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly found that Mr Woldbye missed two emergency notifications and “several” phone calls on the night of the fire and the subsequent power outage because his mobile phone had gone into “silent mode”.
In the early hours of 21 March, Heathrow took the decision to stop operations at the airport. Mr Woldbye became aware of what had happened at around 6:45 am.
He told the BBC he was satisfied with the crisis management procedures that were in place and went into action while he was sleeping.
“Of course, an organisation like ours has to be able to manage whether the captain’s on the bridge or not and in this particular case, we took the right decisions,” he said.
An investigation into how the fire started at an electrical substation which supplied power to Heathrow discovered that it was the result of a known fault at the site.
National Grid, which owns the substation, had been aware of a problem since 2018 but failed to fix it.
As the results of the investigation by the National Energy Systems Operator (NESO) were published, Heathrow said it was considering legal action against National Grid.
Heathrow uses as much electricity as a small city, and it has three connections to the grid.
In Heathrow’s results, which showed a 1.9% rise in revenues to £1.7bn, it said the NESO report found “clear failings by National Grid Electricity Transmission that resulted in a loss for both Heathrow and airlines.”
It added: “Our expectation is that [National Grid] takes accountability for these failings.”
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