Thousands of passengers are facing delays and cancellations after Heathrow, Europe’s busiest airport, was forced to close following a fire at a nearby substation.

Travellers heading to weddings, the Arctic Circle, rugby matches and birthdays have been left scrambling to find alternatives.

Around 1,357 flights have been affected, according to data from Flight Radar.

Follow live updates on Heathrow closure

Sleeping in the snow

Jordan Wylie MBE told Sky News he is sleeping in the snow tonight after his flight home from northern Sweden was cancelled.

The adventurer was training for an Antarctic expedition where he will attempt to climb a series of unclimbed and unnamed peaks in aid of the Army Cadets Charity.

However, his training has been extended by one more day because of the Heathrow chaos and he will sleep in his tent again.

Read more: What are your rights if your flight is delayed or cancelled?

He will now have to fly “from Northern Sweden to Stockholm to Frankfurt to Heathrow but not for at least 24 hours”, according to representatives he’s spoken to from Scandinavia Airlines (SAS).

Long-awaited best friend’s wedding

One woman in Minneapolis said her husband would miss his best friend’s wedding after their flight was turned around over the Atlantic Ocean.

“This wedding is a huge deal because it got postponed due to Covid, then their toddler got leukaemia,” she said.

“Now the wedding is finally happening. We are so gutted,” she said, adding it was the family’s first international flight.

“We are back in our car in Minneapolis heading home at 2.40am with our toddlers wide awake in the back seat wondering why we aren’t in London.”

“Absolute shambles” says passenger heading back for new job

Lloyd Mcbratney described “panic and confusion” on his flight from Kuwait to Heathrow when the plane “suddenly U-turned without explanation”.

He and his girlfriend were travelling back from a trip to the Philippines but are now waiting at an airport hotel in Kuwait.

“We have no idea when we will be going back home, 0 guidance, 0 communication,” he told Sky News.

To make matters worse, Mr Mcbratney starts a new job on Monday.

“Absolute shambles,” he said.

Rugby juniors missing out on ‘trip of a lifetime’

Alex Wiffen says the London Irish Under 12s rugby team have had the “trip of a lifetime” to Dublin thrown into disarray.

Forty-five girls and boys were supposed to graduate from minis to their first junior rugby games this weekend after fundraising for the trip for a year, he said.

“It’s a trip that’s been happening for 40 years and it’s the inaugural trip for the girls’ team,” says Alex.

“Our flights at 8am this morning were cancelled and now there is no way to get to Dublin.”

The players and 70 parents are now just “praying we can get there ASAP” before their first match against Clontarf Rugby Club tomorrow morning.

Stuck at Manchester airport

Nigel and Pam Turner have been diverted into Manchester Airport from Heathrow after they flew out from Dubai.

They were expecting to land at Heathrow at 7am – but are now stuck waiting in Manchester Airport until 7pm for an onward flight to Guernsey, which they paid for themselves.

The couple said they only found out what had happened while they were in the air – when they saw the couple in front had the news on their screens, and realised there had been a fire affecting Heathrow.

It wasn’t until the plane was over the English Channel they found out they would actually be landing in Manchester.

Speaking from a coffee shop at T2 arrivals, they said they were in good spirits, but hoping to find somewhere comfortable to wait out the nine hours before their flight out. “C’est la vie” Nigel said. “Nothing we can do about it”.

Husky-sledding in the Arctic Circle

John Climpson said he was up at 3am to fly out to the north of Sweden to start a 240km husky sledding challenge in the Arctic Circle.

“Now the whole trip might be cancelled,” he said.

“Everyone is now desperately trying to rebook hotel rooms at the Terminal 2 Premier Inn.”

Confusion in Shanghai

A family of four coming home from a two-week tour of China said they found out their flight home was “delayed” at check-in at Shanghai airport.

After travelling from Beijing to Xi’an and Shanghai, Sohan Shah and his family, from Croydon, found confusing scenes at the airport.

“Due to the language barrier staff could not explain to us why, until we saw the Sky News report explaining the Heathrow fire,” said Mr Shah.

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“[The airport staff] kept sending us back and forth to different counters where we have now been rebooked to a flight to London Gatwick at 1.30 in the morning,” he told Sky News.

“They eventually put us in a coach to a local hotel and provided food vouchers for the night,” he said.

From Derby to DC for 50th birthday

Virgin Atlantic passenger Andy was supposed to be flying from Heathrow to Washington DC today to start his 50th birthday celebrations.

Instead, he is stuck in a hotel room he booked for last night to break up the travel day.

“I live in Derby – and I’m unsure whether to stay in London or go home and wait to hear more,” he said.

Heathrow has cancelled all flights until midnight on Friday.

U-turn to the US

Rafa, from London, was on a flight from Dallas when the pilot U-turned at 4am.

“Cannot believe that Heathrow, one of the world’s busiest and best airports, is not running on some sort of independent power to carry on operations,” he said.

“And the decision made to turn around to America is crazy considering how many flight options [there] are from Germany and France back to the UK.”

He added: “Nightmare on all accounts.”

As the clock ticked down towards 12.01am Eastern Standard Time on 12 March, Liam Bates kept refreshing his browser.

Over the preceding weeks, Marcegaglia, the stainless steel company whose long products division he headed up, had rushed to melt and ship as much metal as it could from its furnaces in Sheffield across to the east coast of America, ahead of the imposition of tariffs.

Stainless steel

UK and US industrially interlocked

Of all the varieties of steel, stainless steel – an alloy of iron and chrome, along with other elements like nickel, molybdenum and carbon – is among the most important. Unlike most other iron alloys, which can rust when they encounter oxygen, stainless steel has a passive film that protects it from corrosion and can even self-heal. That makes it essential not just for use in sinks and cutlery (where most people will encounter it on a daily basis) but, arguably even more essential, in surgical instruments, heavy machinery and the pipes and ducts out of sight but essential to keeping civilisation working.

The trick of how to make stainless steel in large quantities was discovered here in Sheffield by Harry Brearley, and while the laboratories he worked for shut down long ago, the furnace at Marcegaglia, in an industrial park just outside the city, can trace a continuous thread back to him. This furnace used to be owned by British Steel, the nationalised corporation responsible for most of Britain’s steel manufacture until the days of privatisation.

Ever since the invention of stainless steel, Britain has melted, cast and exported vast quantities of the stuff to America. For all that the US has a sizeable stainless steel sector, the two countries’ stainless sectors have nonetheless been industrially interlocked since the days of Henry Ford. You can see it in the way Marcegaglia functions.

It melts down scrap in its electric arc furnace in Sheffield – an enormous cauldron whose electrodes create a storm of lightning that consumes the same power as a sizeable northern city – and adds the relevant alloy ingredients to form a long, heavy metallic bar, a billet as it’s known. That billet is then shipped across the Atlantic to the company’s other site, where the billets are processed into bars that are then sold into the North American market. It is a single economic organism, split only by an ocean.

But today that ocean and that cross-country split have become an enormous problem. The last time Donald Trump imposed tariffs on steel imports, back in 2018, so-called “intermediate” products like the billet made by Marcegaglia and then processed in America were excluded from the duties. This time around, the initial tariff rules had no such exemptions. The upshot was that any steel arriving in American ports after 12.01am Eastern Standard Time on 12 March – including Marcegaglia’s half-finished stainless billets – would incur hefty 25% tariffs.

A race against time

All of which was why Liam Bates had raced to get as much steel as possible into the US before that deadline. But as he refreshed his browser in the run-up to that deadline, he noticed two straggling shipments, still stuck on the Atlantic. The two ships, the Eva Marie and the Atlantic Star, were, between them, carrying about $12m of steel and they had been due to dock in the US on 10 or 11 March. If so, they would have avoided having to pay those 25% tariffs. But now storms and squalls were spreading across the North Atlantic. Would they stray into the ships’ path, disrupting shipping?

If the cargo arrived late, it would obliterate any margin the company hoped to make on its steel. And since those bars were destined for Marcegaglia’s own plant, the company would have to pay all those costs itself (tariffs are technically paid by the importer). Somehow, Bates had found himself helplessly witnessing an unexpected collision of politics and weather – with profound commercial consequences.

Of all the metal items Britain exports to the US, stainless steel is by far and away the biggest category. And the vast majority of that steel comes from the melt shop at Marcegaglia. But the quandary facing Liam Bates, and those companies he sells to in the US, helps illustrate the difficulties of economic policy-by-tariff.

Americans will see cost of most things go up

The prevailing theory behind the White House measures is that by raising the price of all imported metals, it will encourage domestic producers to build new production. It will help the US to reindustrialise – or so says Donald Trump. And in the long run, that might well prove right. Already, metals producers are raising money, promising to restart old, mothballed smelters. After all, if your main overseas competitors have seen their prices rise by 25%, that’s quite a competitive opportunity.

The problem is: building industrial production takes time. Marcegaglia itself is planning to replace its old furnace with a newer model, but the planning process has already taken years; the construction itself will be measured in months if not years too. In other words, even if everything goes to plan, America is very unlikely to replace imported steel with domestic production within the period of Donald Trump’s term as president.

In the meantime, American consumers will see the cost of pretty much everything going up. After all, steel – ignored or dismissed as it sometimes is – is the single most important metallic substance in the world. If something isn’t made of steel it’s made in machines made of steel. And lifting some of those steel prices by 25% will travel like an economic tidal wave through US supply chains.

UK flooded with cheap imported steel

The tidal wave is already washing back elsewhere too. With so much steel now unable to get into the US at a decent price, exporters are redeploying shipments elsewhere. All of a sudden countries like the UK are seeing a flood of cheap imported steel – good news in the short run for consumers, but disastrous for what is left of Britain’s domestic industry.

As the deadline approached and Bates nervously refreshed his live vessel tracking map, disaster struck. The squalls across the Atlantic mounted and the Eva Marie and Atlantic Star slowed nearly to a halt. By the time midnight struck and the tariffs came into place, the two vessels were still many miles off the US coast. They had lost the race. The upshot was Marcegaglia would have to pay around $4m in tariffs – about £3m.

That a company was struck with a somewhat arbitrary fee simply to pass goods from one of its factories to another might be among the most egregious examples of the collateral economic damage wrought by trade barriers, but it is likely to be the first of many perverse episodes, with consequences all around the world. For steel is not the only metal to be hit with tariffs. If anything, the drama is even greater for another metal: aluminium.

Aluminium

The world’s biggest factory – hidden in Scotland

Here’s a riddle for you: what is the biggest factory in the world?

You’re probably thinking of vast, cavernous car production lines in Michigan, of shipyards in Korea or steelworks in China. But there’s a strong case to be made that the world’s biggest factory is instead to be found deep in the Highlands of Scotland.

Not that it looks anything like a factory. To the untrained eye, it looks, instead, like heather, forests and bubbling burns of water trickling into lochs. But the 114,000 acres of estates in Lochaber and Badenoch – the third biggest rural estate in Scotland – play a crucial role in helping produce one of the most important substances in the world.

The Fort William aluminium plant sits under the shadow of Ben Nevis, the tallest peak in the United Kingdom. Once upon a time, it was just one of a constellation of smelters dotted around Scotland, that made this country, all told, one of the world’s biggest aluminium producers.

For all that it is very prevalent in the earth’s crust, aluminium used to be one of the world’s most precious metals – so much so that no one had even laid eyes on it until the 19th century. When he wanted to impress his guests, Napoleon III served them dinner not on gold plates but on aluminium.

An extraordinary metal

Why? Because aluminium is very difficult – even harder than iron – to convert from the ores you find in the ground into its metallic form. Burn iron ore hot enough, in the right kind of furnace alongside the right kind of charcoal or coal, and you eventually smelt out a form of metal. But aluminium needs a different kind of force to be persuaded to loosen its bonds and form into a pure metal – the force of electricity.

So only when the Hall-Heroult process, which allows you to smelt aluminium via electrolysis of alumina (a processed version of the bauxite you get out of the ground), was invented in 1886 did aluminium become a widely available metal. Few people talk these days about the Hall-Heroult process, but it was a breakthrough of earth-shattering proportions. Aluminium is an extraordinary metal – strong but light. And those qualities make it essential in aeronautic deployments. No aluminium, no planes.

It is no coincidence that the Wright Brothers’ plane at Kitty Hawk had an engine made out of aluminium. Steel would have weighed the glider down too much. And it’s no coincidence that powered flight happened shortly after aluminium became widely available. Without the Hall-Heroult process, the world would have been a very different place.

While the process wasn’t dreamt up in the UK, British industrialists rapidly embraced it, building smelters all over the country. But the catch with aluminium is that you can’t smelt it without a big and (this is important) very reliable supply of power. Turn off the power to those enormous carbon electrodes inside an aluminium smelter and in a matter of hours the metal at its base will solidify, effectively destroying it. More than nearly any other industrial process, this is not something you can just switch off willy-nilly, which helps explain why smelters aren’t typically dependent on variable power sources like wind and solar.

It also explains why, throughout history, these plants have been seen as some of the most important industrial locations throughout the world. The Fort William plant provided most of the aluminium used in Spitfires during WWII. It was repeatedly targeted by the Luftwaffe – indeed there is an old German bomb kept as a memento just near the turbines that power the cells here.

Some of the world’s earliest smelters were powered by hydroelectricity – most notably the ones which drew their power from the Niagara Falls plants near Buffalo, New York. But the Fort William plant was subtly but importantly different. Those other hydro plants would typically piggyback off a big dam generating power from a big river – such as the ones you find in the US or Canada, or the fjords of Norway. But none of Britain’s rivers is quite powerful enough or with a reliable enough flow to provide that kind of uninterrupted power.

Radical design

So the designers of the Fort William plant did something radical. They bought up vast stretches of the countryside around Ben Nevis (including Ben Nevis itself). And within that estate, they built a series of dams to collect the rainwater trickling down from local watersheds. Those dams weren’t there to generate power for homes – they were there to collect the water and channel it through a series of tunnels, running 16 miles through the hills and through the flanks of Ben Nevis. Then the water, collected from those 114,000 acres, feeds five pipes running down the side of the mountain which run into an enormous hydroelectric power station.

There are many aluminium smelters around the world and many hydroelectric dams. But none are quite like this one. The point being that without the estate, without all those trickling streams and heather-covered watersheds, the plant here simply wouldn’t function. It is all part of a single ecosystem.

These days the plant is connected to the national grid, meaning it also serves another function: balancing. This comes back to one of the dysfunctions of the grid: it doesn’t have enough high-voltage lines connecting Scotland, with all its wind farms, and the south. So on windy days, when there’s too much power in Scotland, instead of curtailing those farms and wasting the electricity, the plant can suck in extra power from the Scottish section of the grid and leave its water where it is as a sort of battery.

Competition from China

The problem the plant has faced is that these days aluminium is a commodity metal. And it’s becoming harder and harder to compete with the cheap metal being exported from China. China dominates the global supply of the metal, in large part because its suppliers benefit from cheap energy and generous government subsidies – neither of which are available in the UK. As the years have gone by, the workers at Fort William have watched as, one by one, every other plant in Britain was shuttered. Rumours still abound that they may eventually be next.

And, much as for Marcegaglia down in Sheffield, the tariffs on aluminium will only make life tougher for Alvance, the unit of Liberty House – part of Indian-born Sanjeev Gupta’s business empire – that now owns the Fort William plant. Arguably, the impact could be even greater. The last time Donald Trump imposed tariffs on aluminium back in 2018, the rate he chose was 10%. The difference with the steel tariff level (which was 25% then and now) reflected the fact that the US imported far more aluminium than steel. Imposing severe extra costs on it would, the White House worried, cripple the American aerospace and car businesses dependent on the metal. No such concern this time around. The tariff is 25%.

Quite how that will affect the plant here in the Scottish Highlands remains to be seen. After all, Alvance itself doesn’t sell anything directly to the US, sending its large slabs of metal to other firms in England which process and roll them into sheets and specialised components, some of which end up in the US. Perhaps, as the defence industry ratchets up in the coming years, more of that aluminium will be used by domestic industry. But what’s to stop UK manufacturers doing what they’ve been doing for years, and simply opting for the cheapest metal available, which usually comes from China? Either way, life for the last remaining aluminium plant in the UK is about to get harder, not easier.

But while the main upshot of the trade war building across the Atlantic and the Pacific will be to make both sides worse off – that, at least, is the prediction from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – that doesn’t mean there won’t be some beneficiaries in this country. For a small but important example, let’s travel from the far north of Britain to its far south.

Tungsten

UK has one of its biggest resources in world

Drive across Dartmoor, the windswept national park in the heart of Devon, and every so often you come across the remains of an old tin mine. At Fox Tor you find the remains of alluvial mining; there is Golden Dagger Mine, which ran all the way to the 1930s, as well as the hollow stone chimney of the pumping house at Wheal Betsy.

For much of the ancient era, tin – which when mixed with copper creates the alloy bronze – was what we would today call a “critical mineral”, essential for the production of the strong tools and weapons of the Bronze Age. And for centuries, the majority of Europe’s tin came from Cornwall and Devon.

That, of course, is long in the past. But just on the outskirts of Dartmoor is a site that could – just could – make this an important site for critical minerals once again. For here, beneath the soil of southwest England, is one of the world’s biggest resources of tungsten.

Tungsten among few substances on everyone’s list

Tungsten is among the 21st century’s most important critical minerals. Nearly every country has a list of these materials – the kinds of things they need to make their most important products – and the members of those lists vary by region. But tungsten is one of the few substances that feature in everyone’s list. The hardest metal in existence, with the highest melting point, it is essential in the production of hard steel tools, weapons, armour and as the electrodes inside semiconductor circuits. If you are making electronics you need tungsten. If you are going to war you need tungsten.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the main heyday for this mine, which contains plenty of tin as well as tungsten, was in the First and Second World Wars. Much as the Fort William plant provided aluminium for British Spitfires, Hemerdon provided the tungsten and tin needed for the weapons Britain used to fight the Nazis. But ever since then, its history has been chequered, to say the least.

It went into hibernation for decades, a sleep broken for only a single day during the Korean War. Then, a few years ago, investors tried to get it up and running again. They built a vast processing plant and began to mine the metal. But by 2019 the operation had run out of money and imploded. All that was left was an even bigger hole in the ground, a large tailings dam for waste and a hangar filled with processing equipment.

In part, the reason Hemerdon went belly-up that time was because the company made the mistake miners often make: they misjudged the type of ore they were expecting to grind through, meaning their processing plant was far less efficient than it could have been. But an even bigger challenge came back to something that will sound familiar: they were trying to compete with China.

China dominates world tungsten production – even more so than for aluminium and steel. It essentially controls the global market and, just as importantly, the tungsten price. Anyone trying to sell tungsten is contending with Chinese prices which can yo-yo for reasons no one can entirely explain. That makes it fiendishly difficult to compete.

But in recent years, new investors have begun to put fresh funds into the Hemerdon mine, hoping history will not repeat itself and this time around it can exploit that enormous ore resource. And there are at least a couple of reasons to believe (famous last words in finance) that “this time might be different”.

The first is that, in retaliation against Donald Trump’s latest metal tariffs, China has begun to put export limits on tungsten. How this will work in practice remains unclear (remember that like most markets China controls, the way tungsten sales function is almost completely opaque) but if it encourages domestic buyers to look for local suppliers, that could help the mine to find buyers. After all, in theory, it could produce a few thousand tonnes of the metal each year, which would instantly leapfrog Britain to become the world’s second or third-biggest producer (albeit a long way down from China).

Supplies matter more than ever

The second big shift comes back to defence. With the world remilitarising, all of a sudden tungsten supplies matter more than ever. And since defence suppliers pay outsized attention to where metals come from, again, that might allow a British tungsten mine to succeed where predecessors have failed.

Add to this the fact that the mine itself is nearly ready to be exploited and that the new owners reckon they’ve ironed out the problems that beset their predecessors, and it’s a compelling case. They think they could be getting metal out of the ground as soon as next year.

But those overarching challenges haven’t gone away. And nor has another, bigger problem facing the entire industry, not just in the UK but – perhaps even more so – in the US. How can you plan in a world where you just don’t know what’s coming out of the White House in the next few days, let alone the next few years?

Consider: imagine you’re a stainless steel producer or an aluminium smelter in the US. Those 25% tariffs mean all of a sudden in theory you have a competitive advantage over anyone shipping metal into the country. All of a sudden, there’s a strong case to build a smelter or a stainless steel melting shop. So you get to work looking for backers.

Uncertainty creates challenges

But building a plant like this takes time. You need to find a site, connect it to high-voltage power, and build the facilities and all the necessary infrastructure. Best case scenario: it might take a couple of years, but even that is ambitious. And as you contemplate this and map out your plans, those backers will ask you the same nagging question you’ve been asking yourself: sure, the economics of an aluminium smelter might add up today; but what if the president changes his mind tomorrow, or next year? What if those tariffs are pulled by the next president? Then, all of a sudden, the sums very much don’t add up.

All of which is to say, uncertainty around tariffs is a challenge not just for those companies hoping to ship products to America, but for American firms hoping to benefit from this trade war. And bear in mind metals are only the first chapter of what could be a long saga, which ends up engulfing all corners of American trade. These are unpredictable times, however you look at it.

A man with a “fixation” for horror and gore has been found guilty of murdering his housemate and sawing him into 27 pieces.

Warning: Some readers may find content distressing

Marcin Majerkiewicz killed 67-year-old Stuart Everett with a hammer before dismembering him using a hacksaw at their home in Winton, Salford, overnight between 27 and 28 March 2024, Manchester Crown Court heard.

Majerkiewicz, 42, flayed off Mr Everett’s face before carrying his body parts on several bus journeys across Salford and Greater Manchester to dump the evidence.

Police were only alerted when they found the victim’s torso in Kersal Dale nature reserve in Salford on 4 April.

Officers scoured CCTV footage from the site and saw a man going into a wooded area of the reserve with a heavy blue bag – emerging soon after without it.

Three weeks later, an officer working on the case drove past Majerkiewicz by chance – realising he looked like the suspect from CCTV.

When police arrested him and searched the address, where Majerkiewicz had moved to in 2017, they found heavy bloodstaining in his bedroom – suggesting he had attacked his victim there.

Only third of victim’s body recovered

Other remains were found across five nature sites including Linnyshaw Colliery Woods, Blackleach Reservoir, Worsley Woods, and Boggart Hole Clough. Only a third of his body has been recovered.

There were a total of 15 crime scenes, including one on the side of the canal near the men’s home.

Only 30% of Mr Everett’s body was recovered – with the rest unlikely to ever be found, police said.

On Friday, jurors took less than two hours to convict Majerkiewicz, who was born in the UK to Polish parents and grew up in Derby.

He denied the murder but offered no evidence to support his plea during the three-week trial.

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‘No clear motive’

Speaking after the case, Greater Manchester Police’s (GMP) Detective Superintendent Lewis Hewis said: “Marjerkiewicz does have a fixation with horror and gore as we know from his search history, the videos he watches, his tattoos.

“We don’t know why he removed the face, if it’s something, sort of weird fantasy or behaviour or it’s just an attempt to mask identification, we don’t know.

“We haven’t confirmed any clear motive, these are all relevant factors in what may have been going on, financial issues, debt, problems paying the bills, potentially relationship between the two of them.”

Mr Everett met his killer when he was teaching English to recently arrived Polish immigrants.

He had also worked for the NHS and Department for Work and Pensions.

Mr Everett was unmarried and had no children. Known as “Benny” to his family, they did not realise he was dead – as Majerkiewicz had taken control of his phone and finances, sending text messages and a birthday card to his relatives to pretend he was still alive.

Mr Everett began living in the three-bedroom house in Winton in 2013.

He then sub-let the other two rooms to two Polish men – Majerkiewicz and Michal Polchowsk, 68.

Mr Polchowsk, a food-processing factory worker, was initially charged with his housemate’s murder but the case against him was dropped.

Majerkiewicz was unemployed when he committed his crimes and was £60,000 in debt, his trial was told.

Jurors excused for five years

Thanking jurors afterwards, the judge Mr Justice Cavanagh excused them from jury service for the next five years as the case “had its stressful and traumatic elements”.

Rebecca Macaulay-Addison, from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), said: “Marcin Majerkiewicz murdered Stuart Everett before making a despicable and disturbing attempt to cover his tracks by disposing of Mr Everett’s remains.”