Heathrow exec claims airport was 'warned' about power outage days before shutdown
MPs have questioned senior figures over a power outage which shut Britain's busiest airport for nearly 24 hours
The boss of Heathrow has said keeping the airport during a power outage in March would have been "disastrous".
Hundreds of thousands of passengers were stranded around the world because of a fire at an electrical substation in West London, which caused widespread power issues.
Heathrow executive Thomas Woldbye has been questioned by a committee of MPs over the airport's handling of the situation.
He told the Transport Select Committee: "It became quite clear we could not operate the airport safely quite early in this process, and that is why we closed the airport.
"If we had not done that, we would have had thousands of passengers stranded at the airport at high-risk to personal injury, gridlocked roads around the airport, because don't forget 65,000 houses and other institutions were powered down.
"Traffic lights didn't work, just to give you an example, many things didn't work. Parts of the civil infrastructure didn't work.
"So the risk of having literally tens of thousands of people stranded at the airport, where we have would have nowhere to put them, we could not process them, would have been a disastrous scenario."
Heathrow warned about power issues "days before"
Meanwhile, a leading Heathrow executive said he had warned the airport about concerns with its substations in the days before it had to close.
Nigel Wicking, chief executive of the Heathrow Airline Operators' Committee, said he spoke to the Team Heathrow director on March 15 about his concerns, and the chief operating officer and chief customer officer two days before the March 21 shutdown.
He told the Transport Select Committee in Parliament: "It was following a couple of incidents of, unfortunately, theft of wire and cable around some of the power supply that, on one of those occasions, took out the lights on the runway for a period of time.
"That obviously made me concerned, and as such I raised the point I wanted to understand better the overall resilience of the airport."
Mr Wicking said he believed Heathrow's Terminal 5 could have been ready to receive repatriation flights by "late morning" on the day of the closure, and that "there was opportunity also to get flights out".