Alexander Refuses to Check if Any Other Airports Could Be Shut Down by One Fire
Heidi Alexander has been fielding questions on the Heathrow embarrassment this afternoon in the Commons. Andrew Murrison asked her if she would carry out an assessment of “our remaining airports to ensure that they also have multiple supply points for electricity, and that they do not rely on the illusion that plainly happened at Heathrow that those multiple Supply points made Heathrow completely reliable as a hub airport.” Worth checking…
Alexander repeated that it was Heathrow’s decisions to reconfigure it’s electricity network which resulted in the outage at the airport and said “I’m not going to second guess those as the transport secretary but what I will make sure is that we do very thorough reviews and interrogate those reviews very carefully to ensure that any lessons we need to learn are learned and are actioned.” There are two reviews going on – one by NESO to report to Miliband into the incident and one commissioned by Heathrow to be led by former transport secretary Ruth Kelly. Nothing specific on the other airports…
Alexander said later she was “confident in our current arrangements.” Which is what she presumably would have said prior to the fire which took out the second-busiest airport in the world…
In 2024 Heathrow took 28.4% of total UK air passengers. The UK’s other airports saw 211,550,296 passengers pass through. Might be worth reviewing those substations…
