Heathro’s boss said that it was “disappointing”, he slept through several emergency phone calls in March, leading to the closure of the airport and the cancellation of 1,300 flights.
In his first media interview since an explosion in a amazed flights in a nearby electrical substation for 270,000 passengers, Thomas Woldabi said it was not usually the way he had acted.
“It’s not how I generally work, but all the right things happened at an operational level,” he told the BBC Today program.
Mr. WoldB admitted that the power outage would cost “millions”, but refused to specify how much.
Heathro results showed that pre-tax profit fell to 37.2% in the first six months of 2025.
A review of the incident of former Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly found that Mr. WoldB recalled two emergency notifications and fire nights and later on power outage as his mobile phone had gone into “silent mode”.
In the early hours of March 21, Heathro decided to stop operations at the airport. Mr. WoldB became aware of what happened at around 6:45 pm.
He told the BBC that he was satisfied with the crisis management processes which were in place and went into action while sleeping.
“Of course, an organization like us should be able to manage whether on the captain’s bridge or not and in this particular case we took the right decision,” he said.
An investigation of how the fire started in an electric substation supplied the power to Heathro, it was discovered that it was the result of a known defect on the site.
The National Grid, who owns the substation, was aware of a problem from 2018, but failed to fix it.
As the results of the investigation were published, Heathro said it was considering legal action against the national grid.
