March 24th - Heathrow: what went wrong?
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 24 March 2025
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I've spent the weekend covering the airport shutdown. Around a quarter-million passengers who were due to fly to, from or via Heathrow on Friday and over the weekend saw their travel plans wrecked when the airport closed for nearly 24 hours.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Corder. |
| 0:04.3 | It's Monday the 24th of March, a date by which I hope most of the quarter of a million or so people |
| 0:13.2 | who were caught up in the Friday close down of London Heathrow Airport, the busiest in Europe, |
| 0:29.8 | and which had absolutely no flights until late in the evening when 10 long-haul flights were allowed to depart. |
| 0:39.9 | The news broke in the early hours of Friday morning. I was spoken by a news organisation seeking a comment at 3am and I carried on talking pretty much non-stop until the early hours of Saturday morning. I don't have any complaints |
| 0:46.7 | about that. I wasn't caught up in it. I thought it was very important that people understood |
| 0:50.6 | what their rights were. But now that the metaphorical dust has settled, I think it's a good |
| 0:58.3 | time not to prejudge what the inquiries may find. We've got one run at the orders of the government |
| 1:05.8 | and another one run at the orders of Heathrow to find out what happened, but really to inform where we should |
| 1:13.4 | go now in the wider picture. And what I mean by that is that, well, if you go back just 18 months |
| 1:20.1 | or so, August bank holiday, 2023, we had a similar number of flights cancelled, actually about |
| 1:25.9 | 2000 when air traffic control failed. |
| 1:28.7 | And it really exposes a couple of things which I think we need to discuss. And this I have |
| 1:35.5 | written about and talked about in the past. Okay. So the first one is, are air passenger rights |
| 1:41.8 | rules fit for purpose? I think it's fairly clear that they are not. |
| 1:47.0 | I don't know exactly what the answer is, but to say to the airlines, you have to find everybody a |
| 1:52.2 | hotel and get them a taxi to go there, and on top of that, you need to pay for all their meals. |
| 1:58.2 | Well, that's a good aim, but it just doesn't work. And of course, |
| 2:01.3 | British Airways does not have a department of a thousand people sitting around ready to book, |
| 2:06.3 | in its case, 107,000 hotel rooms. So I suggest that we need to investigate the strength of the |
| 2:15.4 | passenger rights rules. Oh, okay, and I think I might need to go and get my |
| 2:19.7 | flight in a minute and carry on from inside the plane. I'm at Stansted Airport at the moment. |
... |
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