Heathrow's CEO says "a few" long-haul flights will take off tonight and that "full operation" will resume at the airport tomorrow morning. Thomas Woldbye adds that he is "very sorry" to those whose travel plans have been affected by the substation fire that shut the UK's busiest airport and that the incident was one of "major severity". Report by Brooksl. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00There will be a few flights taking off tonight. That is what we expect.
00:04And what's going to be taking off and who can expect to get away if there are going to be some passenger flights?
00:10That will be a few long-distance flights. That's all. So we are sure that we have operations in place for tomorrow morning.
00:16So I think you mentioned that there will be some perhaps incoming repatriation flights and people coming back.
00:23So just give me an idea of the type of operations you're going to be doing this evening.
00:28This afternoon we will prioritise incoming flights that have been stranded in Europe,
00:33so we can get as many passengers into the country as we possibly can.
00:36After that a few flights will be taking off during the evening and that is about it.
00:40Were those flights taking off likely to be, I know this is an airline question, but just to understand,
00:45they likely to be people who were due to fly that evening or people who have been delayed?
00:49That will be flights due to fly this evening.
00:52So what's happened here is that people who were due to fly during the day have lost their opportunity to fly,
00:57but people who this evening were due to fly probably won't be delayed too much. Is that right?
01:02We talk about very few aircrafts tonight, so I don't think that is a major issue.
01:07That is a few flights to make sure that we have operations in place for tomorrow morning.
01:11For tomorrow, again, what's the picture going to be and who can expect to be flying?
01:17Tomorrow morning we expect to be back in full operation, so 100% operation as a normal day.
01:24So people who are booked for tomorrow morning can expect to fly normally and what should they do?
01:29They should come to the airport as they normally would. There's no reason to come earlier.
01:32They should be coming to the airport as they were planning to do otherwise.
01:37How would you sum up what's happened today, just in terms of the operation of this airport?
01:41First 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.
01:48We are very sorry about all the inconvenience.
01:51I would like to thank the many people who have been part of bringing the airport back into operation.
01:56That is fire services, authorities, our airlines, handlers and our own colleagues who've done enormous work to get back into operation.
02:04What happened around midnight last night was obviously that we lost a major part of our power supply.
02:11And I'd like to stress that this has been an incident of major severity. It's not a small fire.
02:17We have lost power equal to that of a mid-sized city.
02:22And our backup systems have been working as they should, but they are not sized to run the entire airport.