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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.
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That link isn't working currently, and when I checked it earlier it was referring to an outage which started late yesterday night. So I'm not sure it was relevant.
> So I'm not sure it was relevant. It is. If you read the text on the link it very much describes the situation, e.g. talking about the substation. Second, the start time and other data (e.g. number of properties affected) correlates with that stated by the London Fire Brigade on their website[1] [1] https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/incidents/2025/march/fire-at-...
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> Heathrow is a significant part of the UK economy Is it, really ? From Heathrow's own website[1], so we can expect figures on the "generous" side: "Heathrow Airport is expected to contribute approximately £4.7bn to the UK economy " This incident started somewhere around midnight and is currently estimated to be resolved by 15:00. So let's round that up to "one day". £4.7bn divided by 365 is £12.8m Compared to say, t…
Thats not really a fair comparison. Youve compared an entire industry to one entity within an industry. Id be interested to see what the numbers would be if you shutdown all commercial UK airports for a day. Still smaller I'd imagine, but at least comparable
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.
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You keep saying “No it’s not” and then describing exactly what most people would call “a single point of failure” and “a national security issue” in a lot more words.
> You keep saying “No it’s not” and then describing exactly what most people would call “a single point of failure” and “a national security issue” in a lot more words. What are you on about ? Its not a national security issue. Full stop. There are many other airports in the London area and elesewhere in the UK. Heathrow is a civilian airport, not a military one. 99% of air cargo to the UK does NOT come to Heathrow.…
Not saying this incident is or isn't a national security issue, but this is not really pertinent to whether an incident is classified as a national security issue.
National security encompasses much more than just military-related stuff. The "security" part of "national security" is using a broad definition of security (like "food security" isn't strictly about physically protecting food from damage).
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Haven't they seen Die Hard 2?! /s Grid power is hard. Even with local generation failovers for air and ground safety systems, Heathrow is massive and uses a lot of power (1-2MWh/day). It's hard to route around that sort of demand. I don't disagree that this is something that shouldn't happen, but that's what we say for almost every preventable grid failure. I think this is a national inconvenience rather than a secur…
> Heathrow is massive and uses a lot of power (1-2MWh/day). That number doesn't seem that high, compared to a single high-speed train running at about 300kph or above. Or lets say all of the London Tube/DLR. Seems like nothing, actually.
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You keep saying “No it’s not” and then describing exactly what most people would call “a single point of failure” and “a national security issue” in a lot more words.
> You keep saying “No it’s not” and then describing exactly what most people would call “a single point of failure” and “a national security issue” in a lot more words. What are you on about ? Its not a national security issue. Full stop. There are many other airports in the London area and elesewhere in the UK. Heathrow is a civilian airport, not a military one. 99% of air cargo to the UK does NOT come to Heathrow.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Heathrow is a significant part of the UK economy Is it, really ? From Heathrow's own website[1], so we can expect figures on the "generous" side: "Heathrow Airport is expected to contribute approximately £4.7bn to the UK economy " This incident started somewhere around midnight and is currently estimated to be resolved by 15:00. So let's round that up to "one day". £4.7bn divided by 365 is £12.8m Compared to say, t…
Thats not really a fair comparison. Youve compared an entire industry to one entity within an industry. Id be interested to see what the numbers would be if you shutdown all commercial UK airports for a day. Still smaller I'd imagine, but at least comparable
If we're going to be pedantic about fair comparisons, then really you would need to, for example:
Remove airport duty-free sales figures since that has a negligible effect on the UK economy, but does pad up their bottom line.
Remove leisure passenger derived numbers. Because "passenger tourism contributes to the UK economy" type data are very much finger in the air subjective estimates prone to bias and massaging. For example, common scenario is relatives coming to stay. They stay at your house, you feed them at your house, their net contribution to the UK economy is effectively naff all apart from maybe a couple of museum and transport tickets.
This is way worse due to London airports' lack of spare capacity. They should have built Thames Estuary Airport a long time ago.
If this wasn't executed by the FSB, then they're at least furiously taking notes.