[evgen]

Few people actually include necessary infrastructure into their threat model and almost no one is willing to pay the cost of building effective redundancy into the system. I could probably shut down any airport in the world with a few late-night firebombs tossed into the right substation.

And no, it is not a national security issue. There are three other airports in the London region, plus RAF Norholt and RAF Kenly inside the M25 ring.

[petercooper]

I used to live next to RAF Kenley, it's not really usable in any valuable way - it's a relic. It's for gliders only with no powered flight allowed. It has no facilities and is very uneven/roughly paved, but could probably accept landings of small planes or fighters in extremis. Biggin Hill would be used instead if you needed an airport in that immediate area.

[tomhut]

Small world, I was gliding there yesterday. Agreed, given the state of the runway, Biggin Hill or Redhill would be a better alternative.

[smashah]

Heathrow is a significant part of the UK economy, what is with the dismissive attitude?

I don't imagine an american being so dismissive about JFK being taken offline.

[traceroute66]

> Heathrow is a significant part of the UK economy

Is it, really ?

From Heathrow's own website[1], so we can expect figures on the "generous" side:

"Heathrow Airport is expected to contribute approximately £4.7bn to the UK economy "

This incident started somewhere around midnight and is currently estimated to be resolved by 15:00. So let's round that up to "one day".

£4.7bn divided by 365 is £12.8m

Compared to say, the UK financial services sector which contributed £208.2bn to the UK economy in 2023[2] where an equivalent day out would cost £570m .... Heathrow's paltry £12m is equivalent to a 30 minute outage in the financial sector.

Also, to put it further into perspective - Tesco, the UK's biggest supermarket operator - had revenues of £68bn last year...[3]

[1]https://www.heathrow.com/content/dam/heathrow/web/common/doc... [2]https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06... [3] https://companiesmarketcap.com/gbp/tesco/revenue/

[megamix]

Does that count only the actual airport? It doesn't count the potential business travellers contributing to the economy in different ways. Like if half of the financial sector were due to arrive at Heathrow, where would that be in the analysis?

Just to downplay the importance of Heathrow through numbers is a bit absurd.

[bee_rider]

If half the financial sector is in the plane somehow, and they decide “oh, the airport has a power outage, better crash into the ocean instead,” that might make a major difference. More likely they will go land at a different airport or delay their travel, depending on there they are in the process.

It’s just delays, not destruction.

[Ozarkian]

You missed the parent's point, which is that a significant fraction of people flying to London because they have business to do in London, and the value of their time is not zero. If their time is wasted, that has a real cost in terms of lost productivity.

[bee_rider]

I don’t think I did miss their point. The loss is not the deletion of their productivity, it is the cost of shifting that productivity back by a day or so.

[pjmorris]

I've flown through Heathrow a dozen or so times, and have spent maybe $200 in various shops and restaurants. Outside the airport, I spent months working on projects, and both I and the projects involved much more than $200. An analysis that includes only direct spending misses the overall impact.

[AnimalMuppet]

All right, but if Heathrow was down for a day, what would you do? Cancel the trip, and never go at all? Or would you go a day later, or through a different airport, or fly to Manchester and take the train?

[seabass-labrax]

Even if the airline let you, why would you travel to Manchester? That's half a day and a £100 train fare away from London. There's still Gatwick, Stansted and Luton in 'London', plus Cardiff, Birmingham and Bristol as alternatives.

If money were no object even Amsterdam Schiphol or Brussels would make for a faster journey than Manchester!

[AnimalMuppet]

Hey, clueless American here. I confess I have no idea how far apart things are in the UK. "Closer than in the US" is all I've got.

[leoedin]

By what basis are Brussels or Amsterdam closer to London from Manchester? Manchester is a 2 hour train ride from London. Brussels is similar, but there’s at least an hour of mandatory security and waiting. Amsterdam is much further away.

[marliechiller]

Thats not really a fair comparison. Youve compared an entire industry to one entity within an industry. Id be interested to see what the numbers would be if you shutdown all commercial UK airports for a day. Still smaller I'd imagine, but at least comparable

[traceroute66]

> Thats not really a fair comparison.

If we're going to be pedantic about fair comparisons, then really you would need to, for example:

Remove airport duty-free sales figures since that has a negligible effect on the UK economy, but does pad up their bottom line.

Remove leisure passenger derived numbers. Because "passenger tourism contributes to the UK economy" type data are very much finger in the air subjective estimates prone to bias and massaging. For example, common scenario is relatives coming to stay. They stay at your house, you feed them at your house, their net contribution to the UK economy is effectively naff all apart from maybe a couple of museum and transport tickets.

[monkey_monkey]

Or they could compare it to an asteroid hitting the UK and wiping all all life within a 200 mile radius.

[evgen]

A significant part of the economy perhaps, but 'national security threat' is a somewhat higher bar IMHO. LHR has a role of convenience, but not necessity. If JFK was shut down for a day or two and had limited operations for another week it would be inconvenient but would barely register in the national economic stats. I am on a flight heading out of Heathrow on Sunday for work travel and have booked an alternative out of Gatwick just in case. Inconvenient, but not a massive problem.

What will be telling here is how quickly things adapt to the disruption. I expect to feel more impact from the loss of power to businesses in the surrounding area that are involved in air shipment than in the flight disruptions (e.g. cold chain logistics and inventory management for just-in-time processes that warehouse near the airport.)

[traceroute66]

> What will be telling here is how quickly things adapt to the disruption.

Most people won't have to. The substation area covers 62,000 properties, but only 4,800 are actually without power as a result of the incident. In addition they are expecting restoration of power by 15:00 same-day.[1]

[1] https://powertrack.ssen.co.uk/powertrack#QQ0573

[FartyMcFarter]

That link isn't working currently, and when I checked it earlier it was referring to an outage which started late yesterday night. So I'm not sure it was relevant.

[traceroute66]

> So I'm not sure it was relevant.

It is.

If you read the text on the link it very much describes the situation, e.g. talking about the substation.

Second, the start time and other data (e.g. number of properties affected) correlates with that stated by the London Fire Brigade on their website[1]

[1] https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/incidents/2025/march/fire-at-...

[FartyMcFarter]

Oh, I see. My apologies, for some reason I thought the fire started in the early morning hours.

[Symbiote]

According to the news reports, the fire started at roughly 23:30.

[bookofjoe]

UTC? ET?

[monkey_monkey]

> Heathrow is a significant part of the UK economy

You'll need to back up that assertion.

I imagine any American who thought about it would have a similarly 'dismissive' attitude.

[d1sxeyes]

I mean sure it's expensive, but economic harm (unless it's intentional and large-scale) is not really seen as a national security issue in the UK.

[benterix]

> I could probably shut down any airport in the world with a few late-night firebombs tossed into the right substation.

So basically this is what Putin is trying to do - find vulnerable points and attack them. For now, creating disruption without human casualties.