How an Electrical Fire Shut Down Heathrow and Upended Global Air Travel (msn.com)
- Reference: 0176788141
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/03/22/010205/how-an-electrical-fire-shut-down-heathrow-and-upended-global-air-travel
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/how-an-electrical-fire-shut-down-heathrow-and-upended-global-air-travel/ar-AA1Bput9
Despite backup generators, Europe's busiest airport couldn't maintain normal operations, forcing flights to divert to airports across Europe and as far as Bangor, Maine. "Contingencies of certain sizes we cannot guard ourselves against 100%," Heathrow CEO Thomas Woldbye told the BBC. "This is as big as it gets for our airport." British Airways, which planned to carry 100,000 passengers Friday, prioritized long-haul flights to Australia, Brazil and South Africa when operations resumed after 4 p.m.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/how-an-electrical-fire-shut-down-heathrow-and-upended-global-air-travel/ar-AA1Bput9
The “Busiest” Bragging Problem (Score:1)
A power station failure may have shut down a single airport on this planet, but what “upended global travel” was the stupidity and arrogance that insists all we need to support millions of flying travelers in one particular spot via a proverbial two-lane road we refuse to expand.
If we can build an international space station, I’m pretty sure we can figure out how to build another fucking airport. Build the fucking thing. Build 10 more of the fucking things if we need to. Truly incredible
Re: The “Busiest” Bragging Problem (Score:1)
I take it that you never heard of City, Stansted or Gatwick airports?
Indeed - why was this downvoted? (Score:2)
Indeed London has FIVE airports. Unfortunately the persistence of the hub and spokes model of airline scheduling means that a single is usually critical. This is despite the rise in popularity of air travel meaning that direct links between slightly smaller centres makes at least as much sense.
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> I take it that you never heard of City, Stansted or Gatwick airports?
Sure I have. They’re all as old or older (pre-WWII) as Heathrow, which begs the obvious question to fix an obvious bottleneck; What have you done for me lately. Expanding the proverbial two-lane road into a four-lane road via construction corruption doesn’t help much when Demand needed an 8-lane superhighway two decades ago.
Build the fucking thing. Don’t band-aid the old thing and pretend you’re keeping up while polishing that Busiest trophy. Same goes for Atlanta, DFW, Dubai, T
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> Build the fucking thing.
That's what they've been doing since 1946. Heathrow isn't so much an airport as a construction site with runways and charabancs carrying people from one aircraft to another.
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City isn't pre WW2, it's from the 1980s.
London is polluted and noisy enough already. We don't want to be in the hook for the rest of the UKs "growth" by paying for it with our well-being.
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> via a proverbial two-lane road we refuse to expand
What the fuck are you talking about? London has 3 other commercial airports, and there are 4 airports just marginally smaller than Heathrow in spitting distance which flights could divert to. Passengers lucky enough to land in Paris were in London before Heathrow's power was even on again.
> I’m pretty sure we can figure out how to build another fucking airport.
Building an airport is easy. Building it where you need it is difficult. Connecting it to where people want to go is difficult. Building it in a city of 9 million people destroying an entire community in the process is dif
Re: The “Busiest” Bragging Problem (Score:1)
Just break down Buckingham palace. Good spot for an airport. The king will understand. He has plenty of other beautiful castles.
UK, call me if you need another problem solved, or just post something here. I will be happy to help. Cheers!
Yours faithfully,
Some random dude on the internet
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It's a terrible place for an airport: you'll keep getting horses on the runway and that won't do anyone any good.
Think, man, think!
Collective action problem/low probability event. (Score:3)
This instance is particularly dramatic; but the incentives make avoiding this class of problem exceptionally difficult.
Is it in anyone's interests to have Heathrow go down and flights delayed all over the place? No. (more specifically 'no' among all airlines and national transport types; there's obviously a free-floating group of random extremists and foreign policy opponents of the UK who are in favor; but nobody expected them to pay for infrastructure anyway)
Is it in anyone's interests to toss their own cash into the pot when the power supply to Heathrow hasn't failed in years and, anyway, the backup generators are probably fine, no need to check what those whiners in facilities are saying? Also no.
It's perennially difficult to find someone to do preventative spending for fairly low risk situations; sure, sell me on paying two or 3 times more for electrical substations when the one we have has worked just fine for years ; and it's even harder when the benefits of reliability are distributed among a fairly large number of entities whose day-to-day incentives are to lower costs to the degree possible: Having to cut Heathrow out of their plans suddenly and without notice likely cost the various airlines a small to midsize fortune; but, on any average day, every cent of 'cost recovery' that goes to Heathrow rather than to them is margin stripped away; and it's not like BA wants to get stuck paying more for the 'B' in their name when their competitors are paying less; so there's no obvious party on the hook.
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That's not how power systems or outages work. Just because your lights are off and your neighbours are on doesn't mean there was any extra money spent on them. It just means it wasn't their feeder which was affected.
Re: Collective action problem/low probability even (Score:2)
The evidence of management failure is backup generators not able to handle the load. Observe the peak load, make sure you have backups that can do that. Barring willful sabotage or similar somebody should be on the hook somewhere.
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The fire knocked out the backups and the grid supply from one of the redundant substations. This wasn't the problem.
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I don't know the numbers for Heathrow, but a comparable Moscow Domodedovo airport uses 30-40MW depending on the season (more in wintertime). A transfer system for this kind of load requires a substation. That also needs transformers that connect it to the very-high-voltage grid. Which can explode.
Re: Collective action problem/low probability eve (Score:2)
Yeah, I was just reading deeper into it and about what philip2 was saying. I guess it really is a higher level grid design thing, but when you see the consequences are so severe, it is clear there really should be a distributed backup in place for things that can just happen, like fires. Totally possible we are just as vulnerable in US with crumbling infrastructure but we should not be.
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Adding multiple distributed grid feeds is not trivial, and it has its own risks. It also is costly.
And airports get closed down due to weather all the time anyway, and diversions to alternative airports is a normal procedure. So the question is, do you want to introduce additional risks and spend a lot of money to prevent a day of downtime maybe once every couple of decades?
Re: Collective action problem/low probability eve (Score:2)
The question is how much did this day of downtime cost the airlines? Easily in the tens of millions of dollars, with used 7 megawatt generators going for a few million, I bet an entire solution would cost 80 million. It really is not trivial when infrastructure like this goes down. Really, if they were able to redirect power from a residential area so 40,000 homes lost power it would just be local news.
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In principle: yes, you want.
Russia shoots 100 hypersonic missiles, at London. Prime targets airports and power infrastructure, perhaps a random railway station.
Power gone ... takes a while to fix stuff. Not just "a single day".
With back up power, probably mobile, you get the airports back online at least to the level that radio and air traffic control - radar - works again. Remove the debris, if the runways are okay, you still can operate. At least resilient crafts like Hercules can land and take off ... he
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> but when you see the consequences are so severe, it is clear there really should be a distributed backup
Well two things here. Heathrow has redundant systems + backup systems, but distribution is never easy. At the HV side of power supply systems are already setup with N-1 redundancy or sometimes even N-2. They are often setup in rings allowing not just loss of a feeder but also loss of a link between equipment, and generators can only do so much.
But the bigger question is how "severe" are the consequences. The airport was unable to process passengers for 18 hours causing a couple of hundred flights to be canc
Sounds right to me (Score:2)
Not sure why you got downvoted; NOT deserved.
Get the manager to sign off as to their belief that the system is resilient. Then find out if they were lying...