Heathrow Airport closed latest: Heathrow hopes to run full operation on Saturday as it starts moving aircraft

Cost-benefit analysis will continue after embarrassing failurepublished at 21:09 Greenwich Mean Time 21 March

Simon Jack
Business editor

Image source, Getty Images

How can a single fire — at a single electricity source — knock out one of the world’s major infrastructure hubs with disruption to hundreds of thousands of passengers and millions of tons of cargo?

The International Airlines industry body head, and former boss of BA calls it a “clear planning failure”, while the chair of the UK’s National Infrastructure Commission says it highlights the need for standards of national resilience to be established. Meanwhile, Number 10 says there are clearly “questions to answer”.

No kidding.

So called business continuity — or disaster recovery — plans keep many organisations top brass awake at night.

Banks, data centres, stock exchanges, hospitals, all have contingency plans. Heathrow itself does have more than one source of power but as one insider told the BBC,this was a “particularly important” bit.

But sometimes — like now — a chain is only important as its weakest link and having a whole extra — redundant most of the time — resource, costs money and Heathrow is a privately owned business.

That kind of cost-benefit analysis will continue long after the passengers and cargo delayed by today’s disruptive, and internationally embarrassing, failure have got where they are going.