October 11th - How the car park fire at Luton Airport is affecting flights
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 11 October 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At around 9pm on the 10th October, a car catching fire in a car park at London Luton Airport quickly engulfed the car park, subsuming other cars parked nearby. The fire has caused structural damage to the car park and led to the grounding of all flights from the busy airport until later today. I give you the lowdown on what's happened and what's going to happen next.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and I'm coming to you today from a place I wasn't expecting to be this morning. |
| 0:11.5 | It's a patch of ground outside a car park at Luton Airport. I'm just looking across I can see devastation that was wrought upon the airport car park last night. |
| 0:24.5 | Fire broke out just before 9pm, spread very rapidly through the car park. |
| 0:31.1 | Apparently Land Rover diesel engine started the blaze. |
| 0:35.4 | It was so fierce, of course, with lots of fuel around and indeed batteries |
| 0:41.4 | that the car park is severely damaged right down to the ground floor. |
| 0:47.8 | I can see just over to my left. |
| 0:51.0 | What the problem is for passengers has nothing to do with cars, although there's about |
| 0:57.5 | 1,500 people who are going to get an unfortunate surprise when they try to come and collect |
| 1:03.0 | their cars. It is the sheer number of cancellations and delays. It really started just after 9 o'clock. Flights due to go out from |
| 1:13.4 | Luton Airport were grounded, 10 of them. All the late departures didn't go out at all. Passengers |
| 1:20.5 | were eventually taken off the planes where they were sitting and waiting to go and told find a hotel. |
| 1:27.0 | Obviously all the hotels were full i've |
| 1:28.6 | been talking to people who spent the night sleeping on the floor in the terminal it's a really |
| 1:34.9 | tough picture for an awful lot of people those several uh well over 1,600 people affected there |
| 1:43.7 | you've got maybe 4,000 who woke up this morning. well, over 1,600 people affected there. |
| 1:51.5 | You've got maybe 4,000 who woke up this morning where they weren't expecting to be as a result of diversions. |
| 1:55.1 | We had 23 inbound flights diverted. |
| 2:02.5 | They were going to fly to Luton, but instead they ended up, well, the lucky ones at Stansted or at Gatwick. |
| 2:09.2 | The unlucky ones, East Midlands, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Cardiff and Bristol. |
| 2:13.5 | So, well over 100 miles away for a lot of people. |
| 2:18.3 | The problem, though, is for people booked to travel today. Flights were due to start before 6am today going out from Luton to places across the UK, |
... |
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