What has gone wrong at Heathrow? The airport that confidently laid out expansion plans and charged its customers a hefty premium has been repeatedly suffering the kind of chaos people pay money to avoid: flight cancellations, long queues, lost baggage mountains and strike threats. Now, at the start of the full summer peak, it has told airlines to turn passengers away.
In a week when baking temperatures swept across Britain, few places were feeling the heat more. Heathrow’s own posters highlighting the “elephant in the room” – aviation’s contribution to climate change – have never looked more apposite as the mercury hit a record 40.2C at the airport, the grass between its runways parched a desert brown.
