The “unprecedented” shutdown of Heathrow airport last month cost airlines up to £100 million, MPs were told today.Nigel Wicking, chief executive, Heathrow Airline Operators' Committee which represents airlines that use airport, said it was “incredible” that the west London hub’s conditions of use meant they were unable to claim any of the estimated £60 million to £100 million losses back.
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00:00I think, maybe to address that point, why did we close the airport?
00:05When we cannot safely operate the airport,
00:10and when we cannot guarantee and have full visibility and transparency
00:15on the fact that we can operate the airport safely,
00:18then we cannot operate the airport.
00:20I think the only thing we could have done worse than that
00:22would have been to let passengers travel from an unsafe airport.
00:26That is not an option, and we cannot compromise on that.
00:30That's quite clear in our license with the Civil Aviation Authority.
00:36So it became quite clear that we could not operate the airport safely
00:41quite early in this process, and that is why we closed the airport.
00:44If we had not done that, we would have had thousands of passengers
00:49stranded at the airport, high risk to personal injury,
00:53gridlocked roads around the airport, because don't forget,
00:5865,000 houses, other institutions were powered down.
01:03Traffic lights didn't work, just to give you an example.
01:05Many things didn't work.
01:07Parts of the civil infrastructure didn't work.
01:09So the risk of having literally tens of thousands of people
01:14stranded at the airport where we would have nowhere to put them,
01:17we could not process them, would have been a disastrous scenario
01:21which we could not look into, and which, by the way,
01:24was also agreed by the alliance on the day.
01:26I think maybe I'll leave it there. There are many more details,
01:29but I think this is a short summary of how we look at it.