The chief executive of Heathrow Airport still expects 2025 to be a record-breaker for the London hub. Thomas Woldbye’s comments on Friday come three weeks after a complete shutdown of the complex and amid global economic uncertainty.
On March 21, a significant power outage at a nearby electrical substation forced the airport to close and dozens of flights to divert to alternative locations. Operations largely returned to normal the following day, but not before 1,300 flights were canceled and the travel plans of more than 200,000 passengers were severely disrupted.
Speaking following the release of Heathrow’s March traffic numbers, Woldbye said the airport is, “still on track to see another record year in 2025.”
Heathrow handled 6,218,000 ‘terminal passengers’ last month – this figure includes those making transit connections to other destinations. This was 7.5% lower than the same month in 2024, however, Heathrow cited several important mitigating factors for the decline.
Along with the power outage, it said the timing of Ramadan and a later Easter holiday influenced the totals. The 200,000 customers affected by the March 21 chaos represent around 3% of the airport’s average monthly total.
North America Focus
Given recent political and economic events, expect additional scrutiny of Heathrow’s passenger numbers on transatlantic routes in the coming months. The North America total for March 2025 was down 7.4% – broadly in line with the total fall across all regions.
For fuller context, North American passenger numbers for the January – March quarter were flat. In the first quarter of 2024, Heathrow chalked up 4,069,000 North American passengers. In Q1 2025, 4,068,000 passed through the West London hub. Notably, there was a 2.1% drop in the number of North American flights in the first three months of this year compared to 2024 – this could be a metric to watch in the months to come.
Speaking to CNBC on Tuesday, Emirates president, Sir Tim Clark highlighted transatlantic routes as being potentially exposed to economic uncertainty: “We’re very diverse in the countries that we serve, all of which react in different ways to what’s going to happen now… Not all carriers can do that. They may be tuned to the North Atlantic market, Europe, North America, or whatever. Those are the ones that face more vulnerability because they’re not that well spread but in the end they’ll manage and they’ll get through it.”
Less than 24 hours later, Delta Air Lines was the first major carrier to report its Q1 earnings on Wednesday. CEO Ed Bastian warned that: “With broad economic uncertainty around global trade, growth has largely stalled.”
However, Glen Hauenstein, Delta’s president, also said on the earnings call that transatlantic sales were significantly up compared to last year, with this uptick primarily fueled by Baby Boomers. United Airlines – another key transatlantic player – is due to report next week.
March Fallout Rumbles On
Formal investigations are continuing into the March 21 power outage, which caused serious reputational damage to Heathrow. As well as its global status taking a knock, there is also the question of who will pick up the bill for closure’s significant financial impact.
While passengers were not eligible for compensation owing to the “extraordinary circumstance,” airlines were required to rebook affected customers on alternative flights and provide overnight accommodation and sustenance. The cost of having thousands of crews and hundreds of aircraft in the wrong position also adds up.
Speaking at a trade event last month, Luis Gallego, CEO of IAG – the parent company of British Airways – said the precise financial impact of the shutdown was still being calculated. He did however confirm that it will be in “the tens of millions, for sure.”
On the topic of who should foot the bill for the disruption, Ryanair Group CEO, Michael O’Leary, suggested it should be the operators of Heathrow, but cautioned that even this wouldn’t be straightforward.
“The problem is, if Heathrow pays the bill, the first thing they do is put it in their op-ex [operating expenses] for next year. They send it back into the regulator… and it all comes back to us [airlines] no matter what. It shows how fundamentally broken the regulatory system is,” O’Leary said.
Meanwhile, Ben Smith, Air France-KLM CEO, said there would be lessons for the entire industry: “It was very surprising to us that something like that could happen at the busiest airport in Europe with no backup plan.”
Heathrow’s Thomas Woldbye previously told BBC News that the airport would look at what it could do better, however, he was “proud” of its response to the incident.
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