Unprecedented is an overused word in the media but in the case of the full closure of Heathrow airport for a whole day, it might actually be an understatement.
An aviation collapse of this magnitude pretty much shreds the playbook of You Could Not Make It Up, short of a UFO making an emergency landing at Terminal 4 and an alien asking for directions to Pluto.
Snow, fog, ice, storms, strikes, plane fires, a pandemic, crash landings…the world’s second-busiest airport has had it all, but absolutely nothing on this scale.
Like the old chaos theory metaphor of a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil setting off a tornado in Texas, this is truly going to send ripples around the world.
Just look at the numbers on the day.
Heathrow’s four [correct] terminals were scheduled to have 665 departures, or more than 145,000 seats, with a further 669 flights due to arrive, around 146,000 seats. So that is impacting more than 1,330 flights and up to 291,000 passengers, and of those just over half [51%] are British Airways, the biggest operator at the airport.
And those global ripples? With cancellations of hundreds of flights due to take off and diverts for the estimated 120 already in the air it is extraordinary.
Lucky passengers were on a plane diverted to another airport in the UK such as Gatwick, Manchester, Glasgow or Birmingham, or just across the Irish Sea in the Republic’s Dublin and Shannon.
Less lucky passengers found themselves not in West London – or travelling onwards to another destination via a connection at the major hub – but in the likes of Amsterdam, Munich, Frankfurt and Keflavik, Iceland.
All perfectly nice places, but not where you actually wanted to go and then facing the stressful ordeal of ripping up your plans and rebooking to get there.
Remarkably, one flight from Dallas-Fort Worth in Texas ended up avoiding making the trek across the Atlantic to Heathrow and dumped its passengers in Goose Bay, an airport in the wilds of Canada’s Newfoundland.
The personal inconvenience and deep disappointment will be immense: missing funerals of loved ones, weddings, crucial business meetings and much-needed holidays, the list goes on.
And of course there are tens of thousands of people working at Heathrow who also faced challenges, plus all the local residents who woke up with no electricity.
(On that subject, it may be naive, but why on earth does Heathrow not have its own electricity power plant? The backup failed, then the backup for the backup failed and it all went dark. Major national infrastructure and a world airport surely needs its own secure power?)
And unfortunately, even with the fire put out, the fallout will last for days around the world with a potential 291,000 passengers to rebook, look after (rightly, the airlines have obligations and should not abandon their customers, see left/right/below) and multiple aircraft and flights crews dispersed in the wrong place.
It is a monumental meltdown; the skies over my house in Essex – on the flightpath to Heathrow from Europe and the Middle and Far East – have not been so quiet since the pandemic, or even the unpronounceable Icelandic volcano which erupted in spring 2010.
No big long-haul jets such as Airbus A380s and A350s and Boeing 787 Dreamliners plus sundry short-haul planes going over at around 9-10,000ft and usually at the point where passengers are hearing the captain tell the crew it’s 20 minutes to landing.
Just silence in the skies.