Heathrow Closure

I have seen reports of the cost to Heathrow airport for the incident being in the region of £20m - with costs to the wider industry and economy boutne by others.  Given that Heathrow has grown organically with demand being added over decades, i wonder how much of the situation arose because the problem became too big to solve. 

All supplies to the site were connected to a single feeder - my initial thought was to wonder why the load was not distributed across the avialble feeders, but if it would have taken half a day to reconfigure the supplies, with multiple system shut downs required then perhaps a reconfiguration was deeemed not feasible or not palatable.

Looking at the cost - If there are wide spread loads (critical and non-critcal) that are not generator backed across the site, then a project to cover these with generators would cost tens of millions - probably in excess of the quoted £20m loss to 'Hetahrow Airport Limited'.  Perhaps there was always an awareness of the risk but a conscious decision not to mitigate 

I understand that the Heathrow airport effectively shuts down (planes stop taking off or landing at night) so with careful planning changing the power feeds could be done with minimum disruption.

From a historical perspective I took my first plane flight out of Heathrow in 1958.

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay 

chrisbryant said:

Heathrow has grown organically

A common feature of a failure trajectory.

See [1] for accident trajectory diagram (fig 6.3, p149) showing how we bounce along the boundaries of acceptability and safety.

I think flights stop taking off at arund midnight or just before and incoming flights start arriving at 4ish so not a huge window of opportunity.  Maybe the required programme for such works would push the costs beyond the realms of what was deemed palatable - especially if the cost of an enforced outage to reconfigure the supplies in a big-bang moment is only £20m

I wasn't suggesting that everything needed to be done in one night. There is such a thing as staging over weeks or months. 

What happens when the airport has to close because of bad weather (example Fog).

My wife experienced a situation many years ago when her fight into London was delayed because of bad weather and her plane was diverted into a airport in Scotland for a few hours.

Just think what happens when the local clocks are changed in spring and fall and the airlines are forced to adjust their schedules.

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay FL

I wasn't suggesting that everything needed to be done in one night. There is such a thing as staging over weeks or months. 

What happens when the airport has to close because of bad weather (example Fog).

My wife experienced a situation many years ago when her fight into London was delayed because of bad weather and her plane was diverted into a airport in Scotland for a few hours.

Just think what happens when the local clocks are changed in spring and fall and the airlines are forced to adjust their schedules.

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay FL