BBC News
BBCThousands of passengers have had their travel plans thrown into disarray after Heathrow Airport shut on Friday.
Homes near the airport were evacuated and some schools shut after a fire at an electrical substation in Hayes, west London, caused a power outage.
The disruption could go on for days, Heathrow said, as it warned passengers not to travel to the airport “under any circumstances” until it reopens.
Passengers who were on flights already in the air have told the BBC of the disruption that ensued after they were diverted to other airports, or turned back to where they had departed from.
‘We’re on our way back to India’
Emily Adler was on her flight back from India after a holiday.
She said midway through the flight the captain woke everybody up and said “we’re on our way back to Delhi”.
Speaking from Delhi’s main airport, she said she and her fellow passengers are in a holding area.
“We’ve just been told to wait by our bags, we don’t know what’s happening next… it’s just starting to be chaos.”
‘While you’ve been sleeping…’
Steve, a businessman, had been on the final stretch of a 14-hour flight from Singapore to London when the speaker system crackled to life.
“The captain came on saying ‘While you’ve been sleeping there have been some developments'”, he said.
Their destination – Heathrow Airport – was closed, the captain told passengers, saying that they were diverting to France.
Steve found himself in Paris on Friday morning searching the Eurostar site to get a train back across the Channel, while his fellow passengers contemplated an eight-hour coach ride.
His was not the only flight forced to change course. Halfway through a flight from Jamaica to London, Sandeep Singh Mahay’s plane started to double back.
“The captain told us that no UK, European or American airports would allow us to land, so we turned back.”
Sandeep said she had been stuck in Montego Bay’s Sangster International Airport for hours – with no updates and no accommodation offered.
“They told us they were unable to sort out accommodation and most places are fully booked up.”
‘Sat on the cold, hard floor for hours’
Meanwhile, 3,000 miles (5,000km) away in New York, Danielle, from Shropshire, said she and her parents were left to fend for themselves at JFK Airport after their British Airways (BA) flight was cancelled.
Passengers had boarded the plane on Thursday, she said, but were then left waiting on the tarmac.
An hour passed with little explanation, then several more. “We waited four hours onboard to be told the flight was cancelled,” she said.
She was calling from the cold, hard floor of the terminal on Friday morning, where they had been camped for several hours.
“No new flights have been found, no accommodation has been offered or is even available to book.”
She said among her fellow passengers were “elderly and young children who have been sat on the hard floor for hours.”
“We have been issued a $9 (£6.95) food voucher, which will be interesting when a bottle of Evian water here costs $6 (£4.64),” she said.
A BA spokesperson said it had to cancel all short-haul flights in and out of the airport on Friday and was reviewing its long-haul schedule “as well as the implications for our schedule for tomorrow and beyond”.
“We will update our customers as soon as possible and we continue to ask them not to travel to Heathrow Airport, but to check on ba.com for the latest flight information.”
Affected passengers will be contacted with options including rebooking their flight or receiving a full refund, the airline said.
Danielle counts herself as fortunate.
“There is a nurse I am with who has a shift on Saturday, she is now missing out on wages,” she said.
“There is another lady missing her daughter’s birthday party.”
For Liz, it was her son’s graduation.
After her train to watch the ceremony in Scotland was cancelled, Liz booked a flight instead. But that too was called off.
Awake since 03:45 GMT, she told the BBC: “Worse things happen, and I’m now watching my son’s graduation online.”
But Annabelle Kiff said she was “genuinely gutted” after the shutdown cancelled her 25th birthday trip to New York.
Annabelle, from Brighton, and her partner Max woke up early on Friday to the news of the disruption.
“There were a lot of tears this morning and I was really upset,” she told the BBC.
“We sat there in the dark not knowing what to do, but we decided not to get on the coach. It felt like a lost cause.”
Annabelle said she had been offered a full refund on her flights and package holiday, which she booked through BA, and would aim to re-book the trip at a later date.
‘Tired, frustrated, angry’
As the impact of this shutdown rippled across the globe, some stranded passengers worried that it could take far longer than just the weekend to get home.
In Terminal 4 at JFK, British serviceman William Hastings, 31, camped out, enduring a similar ordeal with a different airline, Delta.
He and two of his colleagues have been away from home these past six months on a military attachment in the US. They were finally on the long way home, setting off from Virginia on Thursday.
While making the transfer at JFK, William saw the tweet from Heathrow Airport saying it was closed. But there was no confirmation from Delta until at least an hour later.
When the cancellations were finally announced to the two Heathrow-bound flights, it was chaos he said.
“Suddenly you’ve got 500 people rushing [to the bookings desk] to get to these three Delta agents to try and rebook flights,” he said.
“People are being told all different kinds of things.”
Several passengers from different airports across the globe told of their disappointment over how airlines responded to the disruption.
“They just put some bottles of water, a few packets of crisps, that’s it,” Mr Hastings said.
“Tired. Frustrated. Angry,” is how he summed it up. It was just past 04:00 local time in New York when he spoke to the BBC. He had been up for 18 hours at that point.
He said he and his two colleagues queued for four hours to secure a replacement flight in the end and a hotel organised by the airline – 30 miles from the airport.
Their return flight now is not until Sunday afternoon and they are having to fly via Germany to return to the UK, he said.
“My colleagues and I are now going to Munich but not for two days… and that depends on whether Heathrow is even operational or not.”
A Delta spokesperson said it had suspended operations to Heathrow “and provided customers additional flexibility in rebooking their travel”.
Have your flights been cancelled, diverted or delayed due to the Heathrow Airport disruption? If so, you can get in touch via Your Voice, Your BBC News.
