At least 19 daily flights from airports across India to Britain’s Heathrow airport were disrupted on Friday, leaving thousands of passengers stranded and scrambling for alternative travel options following the shutdown of Europe’s busiest travel hub after a power outage, caused by a massive fire at an electric substation.
Air India on Friday said its operations to and from Heathrow had been significantly impacted, with one flight returning to Mumbai, another from Delhi diverted to Frankfurt and other flights cancelled. According to Cirium, an aviation analytics company, Air India operates six daily flights from Indian airports to Heathrow, with a total of 1,843 seats. The airline, however, said its services to London Gatwick remained unaffected.
Apart from Air India, British Airways operates 8 flights per day between Indian airports and Heathrow, including three from Mumbai, two from Delhi and one each from Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, all of which were affected, while Virgin Atlantic has five daily flights from Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru airports. A Virgin Atlantic spokesperson said all its “arriving and departing flights are cancelled until 21:30 on March 21, with the rest of today’s schedule currently under review”.
Globally, a total of 1,315 flights, carrying 2,86,777 seats were scheduled to land at Heathrow on March 20 and 21. On the departure front, Cirium said roughly 1,45,000 passengers could be impacted with 669 flights scheduled to take off from Heathrow on March 21.
All six flights from Delhi’s IGI Airport to Heathrow were cancelled. Two of the flights, BA142 and AI161, were already airborne when the closure of Heathrow was announced, were diverted to Munich and Frankfurt, respectively.
From Mumbai airport, British Airways operates 3 daily flights while Air India and Virgin Atlantic two each, one of which (AI129) returned to its origin. At Bengaluru airport, a total of five flights were affected.