The Tribune

By BRIAN MELLEY, 

DANICA KIRKA and JILL LAWLESS 

LONDON (AP) — A large fire near London's Heathrow Airport knocked out power Friday to Europe’s busiest flight hub, forcing it to shut and disrupting global travel for hundreds of thousands of passengers.

Heathrow said it didn't know when power would be restored — raising the possibility that the shutdown would last longer than just the day, as previously expected.

At least 1,350 flights to and from Heathrow were affected, flight tracking service FlightRadar 24 said, and the impact was likely to last several days as passengers try to reschedule their travel and airlines work to get planes and crew to the right places.

Authorities do not know what caused the fire but so far found have no evidence it was suspicious.

Residents in west London described hearing a large explosion, followed by a fireball and clouds of smoke, when the blaze ripped through the electrical substation near the airport.

Some 120 flights were in the air when the closure was announced, with some turned around and others diverted to Gatwick Airport outside London, Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris or Ireland’s Shannon Airport, tracking services showed.

Lawrence Hayes was three-quarters of the way to London from New York when Virgin Atlantic announced they were being diverted to Glasgow.

“It was a red-eye flight and I’d already had a full day, so I don’t even know how long I’ve been up for,” Hayes told the BBC as he was getting off the plane in Scotland. "Luckily I managed to get hold of my wife and she’s kindly booked me a train ticket to get back to Euston, but it’s going to be an incredibly long day.”

Heathrow is one of the world’s busiest airports for international travel. It had its busiest January on record earlier this year, with more than 6.3 million passengers, up more than 5% from the same period last year.

Still, the disruption Friday fell short of the one caused by the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed clouds of ash into the atmosphere and created trans-Atlantic air travel chaos for months.