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The embattled chief executive of Heathrow has said that it could cost about £1bn to install a more resilient power supply system to prevent a repeat of the outage that shut Europe’s busiest airport last week, and warned that airlines could end up paying higher charges to help fund it.
Thomas Woldbye, who has been criticised for going to bed on the night of the crisis so he could be “better rested” to handle the fallout the following day, has said he was frustrated the incident occurred and would like to have handled it better.
The disruption last Friday, caused by a fire at a nearby electricity substation, led to the cancellation of 1,300 flights and affected more than 200,000 passengers around the world.
John Pettigrew, the chief executive of National Grid, has claimed that there was enough power available from two other substations near Heathrow to have allowed it to remain open during the shutdown period.
Woldbye maintains that the airport had no choice but to close on safety grounds but suggested that it might have been able to switch over its systems more quickly and reopened sooner.
“It’s a relevant question,” he told the Financial Times. “And I’ll start out by saying that, you know, we don’t profess to be 100% perfect.”
Heathrow took 24 hours to fully reopen after engineers reconfigured power supplies and tested that all its critical safety systems were working properly.
“I really regret this happened on my watch,” Woldbye said. “This is not something I take lightly. I am truly frustrated about what happened, and of course I would like to have done it better.
“Having lost a day in the airport’s history is not something we are overall proud of or happy with.”
Woldbye, who left the chief operating officer, Javier Echave, in charge on the night of the substation fire, said that Heathrow was now assessing whether it was possible to install a “fully resilient” power system that would allow it to switch between power sources more swiftly.
He said he was not clear that this option was workable but that such a system would cost at least £1bn.
The airport is able to recoup capital expenditure from landing charges it levies on airlines.
“We need to look at our resilience,” he said. “But how far up the supply chain do we need to go, and how much would that cost? That’s a dialogue we need to have with our airlines because they are deeply involved in our investments. [This] has an influence on our charges. That’s a very big discussion.”
On Monday a body representing more than 90 airlines that use Heathrow said there might be a case for legal action if a settlement over the costs incurred from last Friday’s fire is not reached.
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Woldbye said he went to bed at about 11pm. Some reports suggested he retired at 12.30am, before news of the fire emerged.
“This is slightly frustrating, but I went to bed before it happened,” he added. “Somebody gave me a call which somehow did not go through. I slept through part of the night, until I woke up early in the morning and realised what had happened.”
Woldbye said that Heathrow’s emergency plans had worked exactly as they should.
“My job as chief executive is not to lead every single crisis,” he said. “My job is to make sure that there is a resilient organisation that, given any condition, will be able to take the right decisions for the airport, and make sure that we do the right thing.
“And that’s what we have. I just want to underline that our gold command system was working the way it should.”
The Heathrow board member Ruth Kelly, a former UK transport minister, is conducting a review into the incident.
The government has also launched its own wider investigation, which will include resilience evaluations at other airports across the UK.
