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Heathrow total shutdown
- Thread starter Felon
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Soldato
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Those were very scary to see as a kid.
Depending what industry you went into after school, you might have seen far graphic ones. The machine shop safety ones in the 1980s pulled no punches, but the offshore oil and gas were something else.
Depending what industry you went into after school, you might have seen far graphic ones. The machine shop safety ones in the 1980s pulled no punches, but the offshore oil and gas were something else.
Machinery and people unfortunately earthing 440kV when digging trenches was another construction industry gem. Falling from height, crush injuries we had them all.
Soldato
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Or not because all the safety critical systems were still running.
Aircraft could have landed if push came to shove but that isn’t the issue.
The issue is processing tens of thousands of people and their luggage not the safety of the aircraft.
A loss of power is not something you can resolve quickly with a facility like Heathrow, you are not just rebooting your computer. Each part of the facility will need to be bought back online in stages to prevent massive demand surges.
All of the systems then needed to be tested and confirmed working before they can open up again.
Before they can do that, they need to confer with the grid to make sure they are not going to inadvertently cause problems with their other supply sources and cause them to trip.
No doubt the grid had to make some configuration changes to ensure sufficient supply before they could bring the airport back online again.
The absolute best thing they could have done was sack of the schedule for the day and start over.
Planes will have fuel on board to get to an alternative airport which isn’t a London Airport because they could all be impacted by the same weather. Airfields as far out as Paris, Amsterdam, Edinburgh and Glasgow will all be within safety margins.
Fixed that for you.
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Well, no. 'Aircraft could have landed if push came to shove but that isn’t the issue.' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Could aircraft have landed safely? We could go back and forth on this but I can assure you the answer is no.
Again, no. Simply put, as a minimum, aircraft will have enough fuel to get to an alternate destination plus 30 mins. This may be between 45-60 minutes (using Gatwick or Stansted as alternates for example). Either way, if they end up trying from Heathrow to get to any of the destinations you've mentioned I can guarantee they're going to be declaring a mayday to ATC. They might have more fuel if expecting bad weather for example but or delays (common at Heathrow), but they'll be carrying as little as they think they can get away with. But weather and expected delays are one thing. If the weather is expected to be bad enough, aircraft simply won't even try to go there. Unexpectedly losing an airport for 24 hours is entirely different.
Nonetheless the system works for the most part.
However as per my original assertion, it you lose another airport unexpectedly (Say Gatwick) and all of a sudden you've got 40-50 aircraft bouncing around with 45ish minutes of fuel And again, the airports you've mentioned are all going to be busy with incoming traffic (as a rough figure an airport can deal with 20 flights per hour on a single runway) and then they have to start holding aircraft to deal with incoming emergency traffic. Which then has a knock on effect.
As I said previously, I'm almost certain in such a case there would be multiple aircraft declaring maydays and the whole ATC system would be put under extreme stress. It absolutely is not a safe way to operate.
The take that is hilarious and somewhat saddening is that it's anything but completely unacceptable that a major piece of UK infrastructure, in this case the busiest airport in the world, was taken out of action for 24 hours because a transformer went pop.
Can you name another time this happened? Anywhere in the world? No? Me neither. Now let's go spend millions of pounds on infrastructure that is extremely unlikely to ever be used.
Oh and Heathrow hasn't been the busiest airport for a very, very long time.
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The cost of shutting Heathrow for 24 hours is probably about 100 million. So you do the maths.
Maybe other places have more resiliant supplies... just saying!
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Do we know what sections ACTUALLY lost power?
It's the busiest in Europe if that helps lol, fifth busiest in the world.
Things like ILS transmitter, approach and runway lighting will have backup power but I have no idea how long that last for and I’ve always thought the backups were there to deal with the immediate aftermath of a airport wide loss of power, not extended operation. Because the backups don’t have their own backup.
Also things like the ATC tower.
But things like airport firefighting, ambulance services and general airfield operations are probably going to be severely impacted as well. And I’m not sure how much emergency backup supplies extend to say, the airport fire station.
At best the airport could potentially operate at a vastly lower capacity, but my guess is not long after total power loss, safety drops below acceptable levels.
However I must admit, although I operate in and out of airports as a pilot, I’m not an expert on the ins and outs of their resilience.
Terminals looked to be in darkness, other than emergency lights (they need something like 2-3hour uptime I think it is on battery back up). Things like security gates would have been non-operational at immigration as well, security scanners etc. Whilst I can somewhat understand the old terminals being more of a hotch podge of supplys, T5 should have been a modern site.
Economic Times are reporting a figure of £26 million per day. How accurate they are I don't know.
A drop in the ocean compared to the estimated cost of UK bank holidays - £2.4 billion for each one.
Its possible it hasn't happened anywhere else on this scale as other places have more resilient supplies or alternative backups.
It's difficult to judge not knowing exactly how they're fed tbh. Each of our terminals at work has 2/3 incomers but there's no cross overs. With the right leads and our spares we'd be able to get anything back up and running in a couple of hours though. Unfortunately this was something we had to do last year resulting in me and my lead electrician sat in the ******* rain until 3 in the morning.
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Simon Calder, the Independents travel journalist gave a figure of 100 million on the BBC this morning. He tends to know what he’s talking about but I honestly don’t know how accurate it is either.
Bank holidays may have a financial cost but most people enjoy an extra day off work. Airport closures not so much.
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All my experience comes from the engineering world, hence my hazy understanding of diversion airfields earlier in the thread. Having seen some aircraft head back to France and Germany during the storms at Heathrow I always thought they would be of large enough distance to provide a lot of options when something like this happened. I suppose it depends on the size and fuel burn of the aircraft involved too, plus anything that wasn’t over the channel yet would just go into France or something else en-route rather than continue to the UK.
It’s probably airline SOP specific too come to think of it.
Surely the risk would be based on the likelihood of the event occurring. In countries where there is a high likelihood of power loss or prolonged damage to the power lines they would have redundancies as it tips the cost benefit analysis heavily.
While trying to find how common transformer failures are (in hindsight the wrong search term) I happened to stumble a report summary from about the blackout in 2019. It is an interesting read to see the individual elements that lead to the grid falling over itself
Britain’s Blackout - Drax Global
Engineers must be quick to develop new ways of keeping Britain’s power system under control as it moves into bold new territory, suggests Electric Insights special report.
www.drax.com
Some things of note
At the time of the report the UK had the 4th most reliable power grid when measured by looking at time between blackouts (5 years on average). We were beaten by the nuclear or nothing, republic of Samsung and the clocks and cheese countries.
Newcastle airport had generators and batteries to keep essential systems running but nothing else. I think it has all been speculation so far but We can assume Heathrow has at least that much.
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