Senior staff at London Heathrow Airport couldn’t reach Thomas Woldbye, Chief Executive Officer, to inform him they had decided to suspend operations because of a fire at a substation in Hayes
A Heathrow bigwig slept through the first six hours of the airport’s shutdown because his phone was on silent mode, an inquiry has found.
Fellow executives initially could not contact Thomas Woldbye, Chief Executive Officer, following the fire at the substation in Hayes, west London, a short distance from the airport. It knocked out power to the airport, the busiest in Europe, and left passengers stranded as thousands of flights were grounded.
But an inquiry has found Mr Woldbye, who was paid £3.2million last year, “first became aware of the incident at approximately 06:45 on March 21,” nearly seven hours after the airport’s chief operating officer Javier Echave made the decision to suspend all flights to and from Heathrow.
Mr Woldbye had placed his phone on his bedside table before going to sleep but the device had “gone into silent mode, without him being aware,” leaving him uncontactable as the crisis erupted. The CEO has expressed “his deep regret at not being contactable during the night of the incident,” the review said. Mr Echave had tried to call the boss several times.
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Former transport secretary Ruth Kelly, who is an independent member of the airport’s board, led the inquiry on Wednesday. It was commissioned by Heathrow itself, after the airport faced criticism following the crisis in March. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband ordered an “urgent investigation” into what happened.
Some 270,000 journeys were affected by the closure but Mr Woldbye “was not involved” in the call to cancel all flights. Heathrow chairman Lord Deighton said the closure was caused by “an unprecedented set of circumstances,” but stressed the airport’s infrastructure will be made “more fit for the future”.
The Kelly Review recommended Heathrow considers having a “second means of contact” to notify key individuals about critical incidents. It also noted more can be done after a backup transformer failed, meaning systems had to be closed down in accordance with safety procedures.
Speaking previously in the wake of the incident, Mr Woldbye said “we were handling the consequences of that failure,” and that he was “proud” of the way that the airport handled the situation.
When The Sunday Times first reported Mr Woldbye slept as the major disruption unfolded, a Heathrow spokesperson described the newspaper’s account of events as “ill-informed misinformation”. In response to the claims, they told the Daily Mail: “Thomas, and his whole senior leadership team, were exactly where they were supposed to be during an incident of this scale.”
Last year, Heathrow Airport handled nearly 84 million passengers, making it the fifth busiest airport in the world. It was the airport with the most international connections in the world in 2024.