London's Heathrow Airport is finally operational again, with the first flight of the day taking off at 6 am on Saturday. Three flights were scheduled to depart the airport before 9 am. The first one left for Zurich 10 minutes after its scheduled time. The second flight took off for Madrid six minutes after its 06:10 departure time. The third flight for Lisbon also left the airport with a 23-minute delay.

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Meanwhile, investigations are going on into the chaos that ensued at Heathrow on Friday morning. A fire at an electricity substation forced airport officials to stop all services. Flights that were already on their way to Heathrow scrambled for other landing spots in Europe, while some had to return to their origin points. Passengers across the world are still stranded as they wait for services to return to normal. 

Experts questioned dependence on one power station

Experts were baffled to see that such a critical infrastructure was totally dependent on a single power source.

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Also Read: ‘Foul play’, ‘planning failure’ or net zero disaster? What caused total shutdown of London’s Heathrow Airport

The airport gets electricity from three substations and each of them has a backup transformer. However, when the North Hyde substation caught fire, the backup transformer was also damaged.

A fault by an engineer caused Heathrow fire?

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The reason for the substation fire is not clear yet, although several theories are doing the rounds. While some suggest possible sabotage, seeing how counter-terror officers are involved, Scotland Yard believes no foul play happened and it was "not treating this incident as suspicious".

London Fire Brigade also said that the Thursday night fire "is believed to be non-suspicious".

A report by Politico, quoting people "familiar with investigations", hints at the possibility that the fire happened because of a mistake by an electrical engineer. "It's always cock-up rather than conspiracy," the source told the publication.

Heathrow fully functional on Saturday: Airport officials

Meanwhile, a Heathrow spokesperson has confirmed that the airport is fully functional on Saturday. "We can confirm that Heathrow is open and fully operational today. Teams across the airport continue to do everything they can to support passengers impacted by yesterday's outage at an off-airport power substation," the person said.

Also Read: Heathrow shuts down: Photo shows 120 flights caught in chaos as planes return to Mumbai, Delhi

The spokesperson added that the airport has additional staff at hand and flights have been added "to today's schedule to facilitate an extra 10,000 passengers travelling through the airport".

Heathrow chief executive Thomas Woldbye apologises

Heathrow chief executive Thomas Woldbye issued an apology and detailed everything that was done to get the services up and running. He said that the airport lost power "equal to that of a mid-sized city."

He said that the power supply had to be "restructured" to get power from the other two substations. The process involved restarting thousands of different systems, which took "an enormous amount of time".

"We are very sorry about all the inconvenience. We lost a major part of our power supply. This was an incident of major severity."