Following a severe power outage at Heathrow Airport, CEO Thomas Woldbye chose to sleep rather than manage operations overnight, delegating the closure decision to COO Javier Echave. Despite the significant impact on travel, Woldbye defended the airport's response, acknowledging the power loss equated to that of a mid-sized city. As airline executives worked through the night, Woldbye resumed operational duties in the morning. He expressed regret over passengers' travel disruptions but emphasized that the incident was beyond their full preventative measures.
First of all, what I'd like to do is to apologise to the many people who have had their travel affected during the day today. We are very sorry about all the inconvenience.
I'd like to stress that this has been an incident of major severity. It's not a small fire. We have lost power equal to that of a mid-sized city and our backup systems have been working as they should but they are not sized to run the entire airport.
You can say that but of course contingencies of certain sizes we cannot guard ourselves against 100%.
Heathrow Chief Operating Officer Javier Echave was left in charge and he took the final decision to close the airport, sending a notice to air crew at 1.44am on Friday.
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