“I wanted to a take a few moments to give you an update on how the closure of London Heathrow is impacting British Airways today and what that means for our operation over the coming days.
“As a result of a fire at a power station which started in the early hours of this morning, we’ve been forced to effectively ground our flying operation, cancelling every short-haul and the majority of long-haul flights that were scheduled to operate throughout today.
“This is an unprecedented situation, and we have not seen a closure of Heathrow of this scale for many years. Unfortunately, it will have a huge impact on all of our customers flying with us over the coming days.
“Our colleagues are working extremely hard to support our customers with the most up to date information in a live and evolving situation.
“As you can imagine, our engagement centres are extremely busy with customers phoning in for updates on their travel arrangements.
“We have put all of our available resources onto the phone lines and extended opening times to help us to manage as many customers as quickly as possible.
“If you are travelling over the weekend we are also putting regular updates on ba.com and the Manage My Booking section of our website and app.
“We hope that power will be restored as soon as possible. But even when that does happen, this incident will have a substantial impact on our airline and customers for many days to come, with disruption to journeys expected over the coming days.
“To give you an idea of the scale of disruption we face which we’re working to minimise, today we were due to operate more than 670 flights carrying around 107,000 customers, with similar numbers planned over the weekend.
“We have flight and cabin crew colleagues and planes that are currently at locations where we weren’t planning on them to be.
“This is because we had to divert flights that were in the air when it became clear we weren’t going to be able to land at Heathrow.
“Our crews are only legally allowable to operate for a certain number of hours over any given period of time which adds further complexity into our planning.
“That means even if things do get back up and running soon, we will have the logistical issue of getting new crews out to operate those aircraft.
“In addition, our engineering and maintenance operation have also had no power. This is being addressed but is another example of the incredibly challenging situation we find ourselves in.
“We will of course work at pace to get customers and colleagues to where they need to be as safely and as quickly as possible. I am sorry to everybody who’s experiencing this disruption and ask you for your understanding while we work to recover our operation from such a significant challenge which is complex to work through.
“Thank you to our customers for bearing with us and the thousands of our colleagues around the world for their hard work.”
