Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Wednesday,

the 26th of March. That means it's five days since Heathrow Airport shut down abruptly as a result

of that fire, which closed down a substation, which cut off the electricity, which meant that

the Heathrow people said,

we can't cope, we're closing down, see you tomorrow. Well, that left about a hundred

inbound flights heading for Heathrow and with nowhere to land. We therefore started diverting.

Some of them went back where they started. Others landed at a whole

range of locations. If you were lucky, you got into Gatwick, the early flights on British Airways

from Johannesburg, from Cape Town, from Singapore and from Lagos managed to make it to the Sussex

Airport. After that, it was every pilot for herself or himself. We saw planes at Birmingham,

Manchester, Cardiff, Glasgow. Those were the lucky ones. They were on the right landmass at least.

Huge numbers of planes diverted to other European cities, though. Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt, Munich, as well as Shannon

in the west of Ireland and Reykvig in Iceland. Was that good enough? Well, not according to

Matt Perton, an aviation expert. Here's what he's been telling me, starting with his job. I'm the group aviation services

director at Air Charter Service. We're a global brokerage for aircraft charter, but also one of the

main players in the UK aviation market. And so when things like he throw shutting down happen,

we have issues with our passengers that we resolve.

And so this has been a very busy weekend for us, obviously.

You go off and find planes and pilots and cabin crew and get people where they need to be.

Exactly right. Yes. So we did an orchestra charter for about 50 or 60 people, which was into the UK.

After a show, we did a production company up to Glasgow from Bologna, who were originally

rerouted through Heathrow with British Airways.

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