Hopefully you weren’t planning to fly to, from or through London’s Heathrow International Airport (LHR) today, as a fire broke out at an electrical substation near the airport last night. The fire, involving a transformer containing 25,000 liters of cooling oil, is still partially burning.
Heathrow was closed for most of the day, leading to hundreds of flight cancellations. Many arriving flights were diverted to other airports in the UK, Paris, or turned around mid-flight and returned to their originating cities.
According to FlightAware.com, 500 departing flights, which equals 73%, have been canceled so far today. Heathrow Airport tweeted that it is “now safely able to restart flights, prioritizing repatriation and relocation of aircraft. Please do not travel to the airport unless your airline has advised you to do so.”
We hope to run a full operation tomorrow and will provide further information shortly. Our priority remains the safety of our passengers and those working at the airport. We apologise for the inconvenience caused by this incident. (2/2)
— Heathrow Airport (@HeathrowAirport) March 21, 2025
The good news is they expect to run a full schedule tomorrow.
To give you an idea of how disruptive this is, FlightRadar24 posted a great screenshot of what the airport traffic looked like today at 1 p.m. local time compared to a week ago. See below.
👀 Flights in and out of London-Heathrow last week and today at 13:00 UTC. pic.twitter.com/CKo3SqAQfP
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) March 21, 2025
Unfortunately, I’ve been in a London airport (Gatwick) when all flights were halted. This was on August 11, 2006, when British authorities announced they had uncovered a major terrorist plot to down planes using liquid explosives in carry-on bags. The airport was completely packed and you couldn’t even walk. I waited in line to check in for four and a half hours and moved just a few feet. The good news is that everyone was orderly and well-behaved.
If you are caught up in this mess, don’t panic. Here’s what to do:
Contact your airline
Contact your airline by phone, website, travel agent or their app and find out if your flight was canceled. If it was, don’t go to the airport. If you’re already there, try to book a hotel ASAP. See if the airline can get you on a flight out of the closest airport. Or, if necessary, purchase a new ticket right away and hope for reimbursement through your travel insurance or employer.
Hopefully you purchased your ticket with a credit card that offers travel insurance or protection benefits. Even better if you purchased travel insurance (I have an annual plan with Allianz).
Book a hotel
Get yourself a hotel before they all fill up.
Try an alternate airport
If you absolutely need to get to your destination today, consider getting out of LHR and heading to one of the nearby airports like Gatwick, Stansted, London City, or even Paris, Manchester, Cardiff, Glasgow, or Edinburgh. The latter are all accessible by train.
Keep your receipts
Be sure to keep receipts for everything – I photograph and store them as PDFs.
In situations like this, time is of the essence since hundreds of thousands of people are dealing with the same issue. On a typical day, LHR handles around 200,000 passengers, though this number fluctuates by season.
For more advice, read my guide on what to do during weather delays and flight cancellations.
KEEP READING
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–Travel hack: How to use your wireless headphones to watch in-flight movies
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