Nick Wicking, Chief Executive of the Heathrow Airline Operators’ Committee, testified before the Transport Select Committee that he had flagged vulnerabilities in the airport’s power supply on 15 March and again on 19 March—just days before a fire at a substation caused a full-day shutdown on 21 March.

Wicking said the warnings followed a series of incidents involving cable and wire theft, one of which had previously disabled runway lighting.

“That obviously made me concerned,” he said. “As such, I raised the point—I wanted to understand better the overall resilience of the airport.”

The outage, which left the UK’s busiest airport temporarily inoperable, caused widespread disruption to flights, passenger services, and the surrounding transport network.

Heathrow CEO Thomas Woldbye also appeared before MPs, defending the decision to shut down operations and calling the move essential for safety.

“It became quite clear we could not operate the airport safely quite early in this process, and that is why we closed the airport,” Woldbye said. “If we had not done that, we would have had thousands of passengers stranded at the airport at high risk to personal injury, gridlocked roads around the airport… it would have been a disastrous scenario.”

Woldbye added that the outage also affected approximately 65,000 homes and local institutions, disabling traffic lights and other critical civil infrastructure in the area.