Flights slowly resumed Friday at London’s Heathrow Airport, which grappled with a fire that shut down the airport and stranded thousands of passengers.
Major carrier British Airways, which canceled hundreds of flights Friday, was allowed to fly eight long-haul flights out.
The fire at a nearby substation late Thursday night left the airport, the main base for British Airways, without power and unable to get planes in or out.
Heathrow officials announced at 4:13 p.m. local time Friday that they were able to restart some flights.
British Airways flights able to depart included two to Johannesburg and two to Cape Town in South Africa, one to Singapore, one to Sydney, one to Buenos Aires and one to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, all scheduled for 7 p.m. or later.
Heathrow was prioritizing restarting flights for passengers who were left stranded by the power outage and flights that would help get planes back to where they need to be.
Airport officials are hoping to restore Heathrow to normal operations Saturday.
“We hope to run a full operation tomorrow and will provide further information shortly. Our priority remains the safety of our passengers and those working at the airport. We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this incident,” Heathrow Airport said.
By Friday night, 866 flights had been canceled and 29 delayed, the vast majority of them British Airways flights. Of the canceled flights, 132 of them were coming from or headed to the United States, according to flight tracking website FlightAware.
Another flight tracker, FlightRadar24, listed more than 1,350 flights affected, according to The Associated Press.
Authorities are still investigating the cause of the fire.
“We don’t know the cause of this fire. It’s obviously an unprecedented event,” British Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said, according to the AP.
The country’s Department for Transport, meanwhile, announced that restrictions on overnight flights would be waived temporarily to help ease congestion at the airport.
