When a power blackout hit Europe's busiest airport in March, its chief executive was at home, asleep—with his phone in silent mode. Thomas Woldbye didn't find out about the Heathrow Airport shutdown until around seven hours after it began. A review of the incident found that Woldbye placed his phone on his bedside table but it had "gone into silent mode, without him being aware," the Telegraph reports. With Woldbye unreachable, airport chief of operations Javier Echave chaired crisis meetings and made the decision to shut the London airport down for almost a full day, stranding around 200,000 passengers.
Power at the airport went out around 11:55pm after a fire at an electrical substation, but Woldbye wasn't aware of the incident until 6:45am the next morning, though Echave made numerous attempts to contact him, according to an inquiry conducted by former UK transport secretary Ruth Kelly. "The review committee recommends that Heathrow consider enhancements that can be made to the notification process of a critical incident, including options for notifying key individuals via a second means of contact for significant incidents," Kelly's report states. The report notes that Woldbye expressed "deep regret at not being contactable during the night of the incident," the Guardian reports.
The review blamed the outage on the airport's 75-year-old electricity system and noted that while there "is no immediate fix," the airport should work with airlines and aviation authorities on new energy investments. The review said Echave made the right call to "protect the safety and security of people" when he ordered the airport shutdown. "The evidence confirms that Heathrow made the right decisions in exceptionally difficult circumstances," the report states. "While the disruption was significant, alternative choices on the day would not have materially changed the outcome." (More Heathrow Airport stories.)
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