Some travelers were headed to a wedding, some to a funeral. Others were leaving for a vacation in Iceland, taking a business trip to Britain or returning home from a honeymoon in Italy.
But on Friday, tens of thousands of passengers in Europe and beyond were stranded hundreds of miles from their destinations as a power outage at London Heathrow, the main airport serving the British capital, caused major disruptions to air travel.
“We are stuck,” said James Porritt, who was supposed to leave early Friday for Australia until his flight was canceled. Mr. Porritt said that he and his wife, who were staying at a hotel at Heathrow, were not going to be able to leave until Sunday.
“She is up in the room worrying,” he said of his wife. “She has been crying from stress.”
Passengers at the second-largest airport serving London, Gatwick, which received many flights that had been headed to Heathrow, stood in line at help desks, sat on the ground or frantically refreshed airline websites.
“This place is a mess,” said Patricia Bradley, 69, noting that she had lined up in “about six different places.”
The scene at Gatwick was in stark contrast to the eerie quiet at Heathrow, usually one of the world’s busiest airports. The drop-off zone at Terminal 3 was deserted; runways and airline counters were empty.
Denyse Kumbuka, a teacher who had been trying to get home to Dallas, said that she might have to try to sleep in the terminal because she could not afford a hotel. “I don’t have a choice,” she said.
The power outage, caused by a fire at an electrical substation near Heathrow, forced the authorities to close the airport for all of Friday. They warned that flight disruptions could last for days.
A glance at Heathrow’s flight information board on Friday morning gave a sense of just how big the shock waves from the closure would be. Flights from Brunei, India and Vietnam were scheduled to land, and passengers had been expecting to board planes taking them to dozens of destinations: Miami, Singapore, Tokyo… the list went on.
“I am extremely frustrated,” Tori Allen, 31, who was supposed to leave London for a birthday trip to Iceland on Friday night, said, adding, “It’s all quite chaotic.” She had not heard anything from her airline, she said, but she went ahead and booked new tickets for Saturday morning, for double the price.
Travelers took to social media to complain about the disruption and ask the airlines for help. One wrote that she could no longer run the half-marathon she had prepared for, another that he had had to pull out of a Pokémon Go championship.
In the Chinese city of Shenzhen, Lukas Zou was among the travelers waiting for news about a flight to London. Mr. Zou, who works at a trading firm, said that he had learned of the Heathrow shutdown just as he was about to board his Shenzhen Airlines plane, scheduled to depart at 1:45 p.m. local time.
“With so much luggage, I don’t know if I should laugh or cry. I’ve already booked a hotel room in London, and it can’t be canceled,” Mr. Zou said.
Dozens of airlines fly to Heathrow from about 180 places worldwide. Many planes already in the air were forced to divert elsewhere. Kennedy Airport in New York had the most flights scheduled to arrive at Heathrow on Friday. Some of the more than 20 flights that were supposed to arrive from Kennedy were diverted to Manchester, in northwestern England; to Glasgow; or to Reykjavik, Iceland.
As many as 290,000 passengers traveling in or out of Heathrow could be affected by the closure, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics company. On Friday, 669 flights were scheduled to take off from Heathrow, Cirium said.
Heathrow is the main hub for British Airways, which said that it was redirecting flights to other airports in Britain, where possible.
At Fiumicino Airport in Rome, dozens stood in line at the British Airways counter. The airport’s information board showed that four British Airways flights were canceled on Friday morning.
A group of high school students from Arizona, planning to fly home via Heathrow after a week in Italy, arrived at Fiumicino to disappointment. “We didn’t find out the flight was canceled until half of our party had checked in,” said Angel Brady, a chaperone on the trip. She said that the group would miss its connecting flight to Phoenix.
North American, Asian and Australian airlines were also affected. American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Air Canada and JetBlue were among those having to divert their Heathrow-bound jets or return them to the airports they had come from.
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