Heathrow Airport Closure Wreaks Havoc on Travelers Worldwide

Some travelers were headed to a wedding, some to a funeral. Others were leaving for a vacation in Iceland, taking a business trip to Britain or returning home from a honeymoon in Italy.

But on Friday, tens of thousands of passengers in Europe and beyond were stranded hundreds of miles from their destinations as a power outage at London Heathrow, the main airport serving the British capital, caused major disruptions to air travel.

“It’s a crazy situation,” said Roxanna Bagherzadeh, who was missing Persian New Year’s celebrations with her mother and other relatives in London because her flight from New York had been canceled.

Ms. Bagherzadeh, 27, had intended to have dinner with her grandmother who had traveled from France to Britain for the occasion, but instead, she sat on a plane on the tarmac for two hours before disembarking and returning home.

“I had a quick cry, because I wanted to see my mom,” Ms. Bagherzadeh said.

Passengers at London’s second-largest airport, Gatwick, which received many flights that had been headed to Heathrow, stood in line at help desks, sat on the ground or frantically refreshed airline websites.

“This place is a mess,” said Patricia Bradley, 69, noting that she had lined up in “about six different places.”

The scene at Gatwick was in stark contrast to the eerie quiet at Heathrow, which is usually one of the world’s busiest airports. The drop-off zone at Terminal 3 was deserted, and runways and airline counters were empty.

Denyse Kumbuka, a teacher who had been trying to get home to Dallas, tried walking between terminals when the bus she was on was not allowed to enter Heathrow. Monel Bailey, another traveler, had used a ride-hailing app to reach the airport, but his car was stopped from entering the airport, too. He tried to walk to the terminal along the highway with his bags until he saw that police officers had blocked the route. It was “a scene of chaos,” he said.

Mr. Bailey, a 27-year-old civil servant in London, had bought his tickets for New York months ago. “I was in shock,” he said.

The power outage, caused by a fire at an electrical substation near Heathrow, forced the authorities to close the airport for all of Friday. They warned that flight disruptions could last for days.

A glance at Heathrow’s flight information board on Friday morning gave a sense of how big the shock waves from the closure would be. Flights from Brunei, India and Vietnam were scheduled to land, and passengers had been expecting to board planes to dozens of destinations: Miami, Singapore, Tokyo … the list went on.

“We are stuck,” said James Porritt, who was supposed to leave early Friday for Australia. Mr. Porritt said that he and his wife, who were staying at a hotel at Heathrow, would now not be able to leave until Sunday.

“She is up in the room worrying,” he said of his wife. “She has been crying from stress.”

Tori Allen, 31, who was supposed to leave London for a birthday trip to Iceland on Friday night, said that she had booked new tickets for Saturday morning, for double the price.

“It’s all quite chaotic,” she said. “I am extremely frustrated.”

Travelers took to social media to complain about the disruption and ask the airlines for help. One wrote that he had had to pull out of a Pokémon Go championship, another that she could no longer run in a half-marathon she had prepared for.

“Sad to miss it,” said the half-marathon runner, Samira de Blij, who had been planning to fly from Amsterdam for the race in Reading, west of the British capital, on Sunday.

Ms. Bagherzadeh posted on TikTok what she called “the saddest travel vlog of all time.” In it, she sat on the plane, took the first step of her in-flight skin care routine — “Little did I know it would be the only step I did” — and braided her hair so it wouldn’t get messy on the flight — “Little did I know I didn’t need to do that.”

“It was all for nothing,” she said on a phone call.

In the Chinese city of Shenzhen, Lukas Zou was among the travelers waiting for news about a flight to London. Mr. Zou, who works at a trading firm, said that he had learned of the Heathrow shutdown just as he was about to board his Shenzhen Airlines plane.

“With so much luggage, I don’t know if I should laugh or cry,” Mr. Zou said. “I’ve already booked a hotel room in London, and it can’t be canceled.”

Dozens of airlines fly to Heathrow from about 180 places worldwide. Many planes already in the air were forced to divert elsewhere. John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York had the most flights scheduled to arrive at Heathrow on Friday; some were diverted to Manchester, in northwestern England; to Glasgow; or to Reykjavik, Iceland.

As many as 290,000 passengers traveling in or out of Heathrow could be affected by the closure, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics company. On Friday, 669 flights were scheduled to take off from Heathrow, Cirium said.

Heathrow is the main hub for British Airways, which said that it was redirecting flights to other airports in Britain when possible.

At Fiumicino Airport in Rome, dozens stood in line at the British Airways counter. The airport’s information board showed that four of the airline’s flights from there were canceled on Friday morning.

A group of high school students from Arizona, who had planned to fly home via Heathrow after a week in Italy, arrived at Fiumicino to disappointment. “We didn’t find out the flight was canceled until half of our party had checked in,” said Angel Brady, a chaperone on the trip. She said that the group would miss its connecting flight to Phoenix.

American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Air Canada and JetBlue were also among the airlines having to divert their Heathrow-bound jets or return them to the airports they had come from.

Reporting was contributed by Nicholas Yong from Singapore; Jonathan Wolfe and Lynsey Chutel from London; and Matthew Mpoke Bigg from Rome.