Qantas Had To Bus Passengers From Paris To London During Heathrow Power Outage (2025)

A fire that broke out on Friday near London Heathrow Airport caused a significant power outage that shut the UK’s busiest air transportation hub for just under 24 hours. Airlines were forced to divert their planes to other airports, both in the UK and elsewhere in the vicinity. Some flights that had just left had to return to their points of origin rather than continuing to Heathrow.

Qantas, the Australian national carrier, has two routes into London and was thus also impacted by the disruption. On Tuesday, Chief Executive Officer Vanessa Hudson spoke about the airline’s response in a conversation with journalists, including Simple Flying.

Passengers bused from Paris

Qantas operates two daily services to London Heathrow, each with a different routing. The first, operated by the carrier’s flagship Airbus A380 fleet, links Sydney with London via Singapore. The other is of course, Qantas’ 17-hour, non-stop Boeing 787-9 flight that links Perth with London. Their arrivals into Heathrow are shown below.

Speaking on the sidelines of the 2025 Airbus Summit in Toulouse, Hudson explained:

“We have two flights into Heathrow that land pretty early in the morning, and they were both pretty close when Heathrow closed down. So they diverted to Paris. We were recovered within 24 hours, and we moved the customers that de-boarded in Paris to London via bus, or we got them onto other services if they were going to Europe.”

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Photo: Vincenzo Pace | Simple Flying

It is not clear exactly how long the bus journey took. On average, a trip between Paris and London can take upwards of eight hours by bus. Hudson assures that the bus was the quickest available option.

“It was quicker to do that, because if you think about it, the aircraft were on the ground and the airport was closed all day. We had buses waiting for them [the passengers], and they got there.”

While direct train services exist between the two capitals, obtaining hundreds of last-minute seats is close to impossible.

Legal action ruled out

Such disruption has costly repercussions. First and foremost, an airport’s closure means airlines simply cannot get their passengers to their anticipated destination as originally planned. Instead, airlines need to find alternative airports and/or get their customers on other flights – or buses.

Heathrow’s closure also sent disruptive shockwaves worldwide. Aircraft were in the wrong places, making it hard for some airlines to maintain original schedules on other services too. Perhaps more importantly, cabin and cockpit crew were also scattered at alternative airports. Airlines had to manage the disruption in accordance with their working hour limits too.

Photo: London Heathrow Airport

The Heathrow Airline Operators’ Committee which represents more than 90 airlines has said that it is considering legal action should a settlement not be reached with the airport itself. For her part, Hudson ruled it out when asked:

“It's not something that we have considered, but I would say that these events are incredibly costly to airlines. If you think about the cost of the recovery of the customer, the cost of the aircraft, time…You've got crew that are out of place and have to be redeployed across the network. It's an incredibly costly thing. I can't imagine how much it costs for British Airways as the home carrier.”

Qantas was not immediately able to put a figure on how much the disruption had cost its own operation. Hudson continued:

“The lessons from these events is that you've got to reflect. The key question is redundancy and recovery and what are the learnings? I'm sure that Heathrow is asking those questions, and any airport around the world should be asking the same questions.”

To sleep or not to sleep

A report from The Sunday Times last Saturday suggested that London Heathrow’s Chief Executive, Thomas Woldbye, made the controversial decision to go to sleep shortly after closing the airport just after midnight. He left Chief Operating Officer Javier Echave in charge for the remainder of the early hours, while he returned at around 7:30 on Friday. The reason, the Times reports, was to ensure he was well-rested in order to adjudicate on Heathrow’s reopening.

Photo: Vincenzo Pace | Simple Flying

When asked, Hudson said the decision made sense.

“As an airline executive when we've got an issue, we've got a team of people, we've got a crisis management framework, and there will be times that I will sleep through that because you can't stay up for 24 hours. You have to trust and depend on the team around you. So I don't know his circumstance, but I know that when we go through crisis, a really important part of crisis management is fatigue.”