Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 260 posts

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#121

Post by crote »

basisword wrote: post #110
blindriver wrote: post #10

Seems like a national security issue if there’s a single point of failure a few miles away that can take down one of Europe’s largest airports and global air travel.

What would you suggest as a backup? Supposedly they have generators/redundancy but the place requires so much power that that can only maintain critical functions (I guess ensuring incoming flights can still land and taxi in the mins after the power loss).

One potential solution is to add a connection to a second substation. For example, Laleham is a few miles south of Heathrow, and can be fed without sharing any infrastructure with North Hyde.

I doubt it's worth the additional expenses, though. Transformers exploding like this is extremely rare, and the main reason this one has such an impact is because the firefighting effort required the other two transformers to be shut down. Investing in better physical separation between the individual transformers is probably a way more effective investment.

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#122

Post by rchaud »

crote wrote: post #116
michh wrote: post #94

Funny, how we're all suddenly privy to highly classified information. Yesterday, if you'd have publicly shared this one substation is enough to take down Heathrow for an entire day, you'd have been disappeared by the British spooks for sharing extremely sensitive information threatening national security and you'd probably end up behind bars for over a decade. Today, we all just know because it happened to catch fire…

This kind of information has been available via open data for ages , and it isn't exactly hard for a foreign power with boots on the ground to figure out either. With this kind of large-scale infrastructure it just isn't viable to rely on security through obscurity. If you want to protect against failure, invest in redundancy.

Sounds like a cost center. Heathrow is privately owned. Would the board approve?

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#123

Post by casenmgreen »

michh wrote: post #94

Funny, how we're all suddenly privy to highly classified information. Yesterday, if you'd have publicly shared this one substation is enough to take down Heathrow for an entire day, you'd have been disappeared by the British spooks for sharing extremely sensitive information threatening national security and you'd probably end up behind bars for over a decade. Today, we all just know because it happened to catch fire…

You don't get disappeared in UK. Stuff goes wrong, Gov does stupid things, so do police - but that's process/people being stupid, not institutionalized disappearances.

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#124

Post by seabass-labrax »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #115
pjmorris wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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!

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#125

Post by baq »

michh wrote: post #94

Funny, how we're all suddenly privy to highly classified information. Yesterday, if you'd have publicly shared this one substation is enough to take down Heathrow for an entire day, you'd have been disappeared by the British spooks for sharing extremely sensitive information threatening national security and you'd probably end up behind bars for over a decade. Today, we all just know because it happened to catch fire…

> because it happened to catch fire

Not a conspiracy theorist here, but... there's been quite a few expensive things which caught fire in Europe in the past year and change and it turned out those things didn't catch it by accident.

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#126

Post by 4587qgVAc »

oncallthrow wrote: post #80
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #61

If this wasn't executed by the FSB, then they're at least furiously taking notes.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg5dg4p2l0o "Counter-terror officers from the Metropolitan Police are leading the investigation into a major fire that has closed Heathrow Airport"

Perhaps there should be an additional investigation why old transformers aren't replaced. The issue is known (275kV, just like the one in Heathrow):

https://electranet.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/15449-P...

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#127

Post by robin_reala »

crazygringo wrote: post #50
blindriver wrote: post #10

Seems like a national security issue if there’s a single point of failure a few miles away that can take down one of Europe’s largest airports and global air travel.

Why would it be a national security issue? Military airports are working fine. National security doesn't rely on civilian airports. And communications networks aren't disrupted or anything. This isn't enabling terrorism. It's absolutely a huge economic issue. Economic-political. But I'm not seeing a national security angle here.

I think the phrase everyone is searching for is “critical national infrastructure”. That is a defined term in the UK, and includes digital things like GOV.UK: https://www.npsa.gov.uk/critical-national-infrastructure-0

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#128

Post by seabass-labrax »

Symbiote wrote: post #57
rich_sasha wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally just guessing: that substation is on the train route to central London, which is the main public transport connection in and out of Heathrow. Indeed the Elizabeth tube line is suspended on the Heathrow branch. So perhaps the core issue isn't inability of the airport to operate, but of people to get in and out.

I think it's likely the Elizabeth Line branch is suspended because the stations are closed, and the stations are closed because there's no power to the buildings.

The Elizabeth line is fully electrified, so why wouldn't the issue be power to the trains themselves rather than the stations?

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#129

Post by chaps »

hypeatei wrote: post #101
michh wrote: post #94

Funny, how we're all suddenly privy to highly classified information. Yesterday, if you'd have publicly shared this one substation is enough to take down Heathrow for an entire day, you'd have been disappeared by the British spooks for sharing extremely sensitive information threatening national security and you'd probably end up behind bars for over a decade. Today, we all just know because it happened to catch fire…

Taking out any power infrastructure is going to cause significant problems, no? I don't think that's a national secret in any country. I get it, all modern intelligence apparatus is draconian but this take doesn't really make sense IMO.

What a weird take. Arresting someone for reporting a major security vulnerability is pretty shitty thing for a state to do. What you're suggesting is that that's not actually that bad.

Same sort of logic that leads to people getting arrested for looking at HTML and reporting that it includes passwords.

Re: London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage

#130

Post by youngNed »

casenmgreen wrote: post #123
michh wrote: post #94

Funny, how we're all suddenly privy to highly classified information. Yesterday, if you'd have publicly shared this one substation is enough to take down Heathrow for an entire day, you'd have been disappeared by the British spooks for sharing extremely sensitive information threatening national security and you'd probably end up behind bars for over a decade. Today, we all just know because it happened to catch fire…

You don't get disappeared in UK. Stuff goes wrong, Gov does stupid things, so do police - but that's process/people being stupid, not institutionalized disappearances.

laughs in Northern Irish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_techniques
Post reply on HN