Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Wednesday the 2nd of April.

I don't know how your morning went, but mine was spent watching the Transport Select Committee Grill.

Thomas Walby, he is the chief executive of Heathrow Airport.

And of course, this follows the fire on the night of the 20th into the 21st of March,

which led to the complete close down of Heathrow Airport on Friday, almost 24 hours without any

departing flights, 120 diversions and a total of 1,400 flights disrupted either diverted or cancelled.

MPs on the Transport Select Committee were very keen to question him.

They also heard from Nigel Wicking.

He is the chief executive of the Heathrow Airline Operators Committee and his role is basically to represent

the airline's interests. I want to pick some of the key takeaways. One was the interesting

point that Mr Wicking had, quote, warned Heathrow of concerns that we had with regard to the substations,

and my concern was resilience.

Now, this was a few days before the fire.

Heathrow absolutely says that this was a completely unrelated case,

and it really didn't have much to do with the kind of large-scale fire that we had.

Heathrow spokesman told me the incident Mr. Wicking referred to had no relation to the North Hyde

substation. It related to a minor substation of which were 250 at the airport. We were well

aware of the incident before Mr. Wicking raised it.

Our contingencies were stood up and the incident was quickly resolved, resulting in no impact to passenger journeys. And they, I understand, feel that to draw a comparison between these

incidents is irresponsible. Well, later on, Nigel Wicking referred to this when he was talking about how much

the airlines lost. My back of a boarding pass calculation is £100 million in lost revenue

and passenger care expenses. Turns out I wasn't far wrong. As I mentioned earlier,

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