Britain’s Heathrow Airport was closed for the day after a fire knocked out its power overnight, disrupting flights for hundreds of thousands of passengers at Europe’s busiest travel hub.
At least 1,300 flights to and from Heathrow were affected already, including several from U.S. cities that were canceled, flight tracking service FlightRadar 24 said.
The British government says “clearly there are questions to answer” about how a single fire could shut down Europe’s busiest airport.
A spokesperson for Prime Minister Keir Starmer said there must be a rigorous investigation to make sure “this scale of disruption does not happen again.”
Tom Wells said the most pressing task is to extinguish the fire, which is still burning on Friday. He said that “at the moment the priority is to deal with the incident in hand.”
He said “it’s very premature” to speculate on the cause of the blaze.
Flight operations remain normal in the United States despite the Heathrow fire, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration on Friday.
Delta Airlines has issued a travel waiver through Sunday for customers who need to rebook their flights due to the Heathrow fire, a spokesperson said in a statement.
The company canceled 10 flights scheduled to depart from Heathrow on Friday.
This is an on-going story.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.