Akhil Vyas, a passenger caught up in Friday’s Heathrow Airport closure, recalled the moment he learned his flight to Dubai for a family holiday was cancelled. He said that he hopes that Heathrow will learn from the incident and create a contingency plan to prevent future disruptions. Report by Covellm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00We woke up Friday morning after planning a trip to Dubai, everything was booked, all packed,
00:06two small kids as well, so as you can imagine it's always quite chaotic. First thing I think
00:11was around 7am, got a call from a family member saying, you know there's a fire at Heathrow right,
00:17because they were the one dropping, it was my dad, he was the one dropping me to the airport,
00:20dropping off to the airport. It was like, oh okay, so kind of got out of bed, kind of came to life,
00:25realised it was closed, but it was very sketchy the details, Heathrow were saying sort of closed
00:31until 12, airlines were saying midday at least, don't travel to the airport. It was frustrating
00:37not knowing what's going to happen, you couldn't get through to the airlines easily, I think in
00:43the end I was on hold for a while, you know 90 minutes or so probably, and the kind of,
00:50the lack of options were a bit of an issue for us, so our airline were happy to move us of course,
00:55they could rebook us for two or three days later, but the schedule was ending for them in terms of
01:01coming back, so they couldn't bring us back any later, so suddenly like a nine day trip was a
01:06four day trip. It's happened now, there's not much we can obviously do, but I hope Heathrow,
01:11they learn from it, I hope they've got you know thorough contingency plans, usually you have a bit
01:16of an ops plan, obviously this happened kind of middle of the night, so I don't know you know
01:21how that kind of worked for Heathrow, but let's hope they'd sort of learn from it,
01:26it kind of you know, because we don't want people to go through that again.