A big fire near London Heathrow Airport On Friday, the Authority went to the most crowded aviation center in Europe, forcing it to close throughout the day and disrupt the global travel of hundreds of thousands of passengers.
Flightradar 24 said at least from 1350 flights to and from Heathrow, and said Flightradar 24, and it was possible that the impact would last for several days as passengers tried to reschedule their travel and airlines to obtain aircraft and crew to the right places.
The authorities do not know the cause of the fire, but so far they do not have evidence that it was suspicious.
The residents of West London described a large explosion, followed by a fiery ball and smoke withdrawn, when the fire broke out through the electric sub -subpaar near the airport.
Tracking services showed that about 120 flights were in the air when the closure was announced, as some were transferred to some flight to Gatwick Airport outside London, or Charles de Gaulle Airport near Shannon Airport in Paris or Shannon Airport in Ireland.
Lawrence Hayes was three quarters of the road to London from New York when Virgin Atlantic announced that he had been transferred to Glasgow.
“It was a red eye, and I have already spent a whole day, so I don’t even know the time I spent,” Hayes told the BBC as he was leaving the plane in Scotland. “Fortunately, I managed to get my wife and booked me a train ticket to return to Auston, but it will be an incredibly long day.”
Heathrow is one of the most busy airports in the world for international travel. More than January has recorded a crowding earlier this year, with more than 6.3 million passengers, an increase of more than 5 percent over the same period last year.
However, the turmoil on Friday was less than the 2010 explosions of the Ikavraglagukol volcano in Iceland, which led to the pulling ash in the air and created air travel chaos across the Atlantic Ocean for several months.
Fire is under control, but the effect on the last days
It was too early to determine what ignited the huge fire about 2 miles (3 km) from the airport, but there is no “proposal” to play the wrong, as Energy Minister Ed Miliband said.
Officials said the London Fire Fire brigade was leading the investigation with the help of the Metropolitan police. A person familiar with the investigation said that the anti -terrorist investigators also participated, for example, because the reason was not known. They spoke on the condition that his identity was not disclosed because they were not allowed to discuss the case publicly.

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Miliband said the fire, which took seven hours to control it, also took out the reserve energy supplies to the airport. Haitro said in a statement that he has no choice but to close the airport for this day.
The airport said: “We expect a major disturbance in the coming days, and the passengers should not travel to the airport under any circumstances until the airport is reopened.”
Heathrow was at the heart of a shorter turmoil in 2023 when the British Air Force Monitoring System suffered a collapse that slows off and landed all over the UK in one of the busiest travel days of the year.
Anita Mindyrata, aviation consultant, said that the closure effect will feel more than two to four days as airline, shipping companies and crews who are transferred to his site and re -booking passengers.
“Once the airport opens in the middle of the night tonight, it is not only about appealing with tomorrow’s trips, but it is the accumulated and the effects that occurred,” Mengerata said. “The crew and aircraft, many are not as they are supposed to be at the present time. So re -calculating this will be intense.”
Transfer and cancel it and in forgetting
In Heathrow, a five -year -old family traveling to Dallas appeared in the hope that their journey will start home – which is still listed as delayed -.
But when Andrea Seri brought her brother, her sister’s sister and children to the airport, the police told them that there would be no trip.
“It was a waste of time. It is very confusing,” said Sri, who lives in London. “We tried to communicate with British Airways, but they don’t open their phone line until 8 am.”
Travelers who were transferred to other cities found themselves trying to book travel to London. Qantas airlines sent flights from Singapore and Birth, Australia, to Paris, where it said it will transport people to London, a process that will also include a train shuttle below the English channel.
The Ryanair budget company, which does not operate outside Heathrow, said it added eight “rescue flights” between Dublin and Starside, another airport in London, to transport passengers on Friday and Saturday.
National railways canceled all trains to and from the airport.
Flights usually begin to land and take off at Heathrow at 6 am due to night flight restrictions. But the sky was silent Friday morning.
“Living near Heathrow is noisy, and there are planes every 90 seconds or so, in addition to the continuous traffic attack, but you are used to that, to the point of not noticing,” said James Henderson, who lived next to the airport for more than 20 years. “Today is different, you can hear the birds that sing.”
Blaze lit the sky and dark houses
Matthew Miiraid was working on Thursday night near Heathrow when he went out with a colleague and noticed that the smoke was rising from an electrical sub -station and heard the sirens screaming.
“We have seen a bright flash of white, and all the lights came out in the city,” he said.
The London Fire Brigade sent 10 engines and about 70 firefighters to control the fire, and about 150 people were evacuated from their homes near the power plant.
“This was a very clear and important accident, and our firefighters worked tirelessly in difficult circumstances to control the fire as quickly
The Scottish and Southern Electricity networks said in a publication on X power outages, which affected more than 16,300 homes.
The UK government agreed earlier this year to build a third runway at the airport to enhance the economy and communicate with the world.
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