Flights have begun landing at London's Heathrow Airport, which aims to return to normal operation on Saturday after being shut due to a power loss. Restrictions on overnight flights have been temporarily lifted.
Flights resumed at the West London airport on Friday evening following hours of closure after a blaze knocked out an electricity substation in Hayes late on Thursday evening.
The Metropolitan Police are not treating the incident as suspicious and the London Fire Brigade's investigation is focusing on the electrical distribution equipment.
According to flight tracking website FlightRadar24, a British Airways(BA) flight from Johannesburg, South Africa was the first regular passenger flight to land at Heathrow since Thursday evening, touching down at 4.37 am. BA, which has a major presence at Heathrow, said it expects to operate around 85% of its scheduled flights at the airport on Saturday.
Restrictions on overnight flights were temporarily lifted to help ease congestion, the Department of Transport said. According to Heathrow's website, there is no formal ban on night flights but since the 1960s, the government has placed restrictions on them.
Around 200,000 passengers have been affected by the closure of what is Europe's busiest airport. A spokesperson for Heathrow said early on Saturday the airport was"open and fully operational", adding: "Teams across the airport continue to do everything they can to support passengers impacted by yesterday's outage at an off-airport power substation.
"We have hundreds of additional colleagues on hand in our terminals and we have added flights to today's schedule to facilitate an extra 10,000 passengers traveling through the airport. "Passengers traveling today should check with their airline for the latest information regarding their flight."
Thousands of homes were left without power and more than 100 people were evacuated after a transformer within the substation caught fire. More than 83.9 million passengers traveled through Heathrow Terminals in 2024.
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