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How long will global air chaos last? Here’s what we know

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4 months ago

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CNN
 — 

The shutdown of London’s Heathrow Airport, one of the busiest airports in the world, is causing chaos across the world today, with thousands of flights affected and major disruption expected to last for days.

At least 1,351 flights so far have been impacted by Friday’s closure, which is due to a “significant power outage” caused by a large fire nearby. Some experts predict that it will take several days for the airport to resume full operation and to clear flight backlogs.

A spokesperson for Heathrow, which flies up to 291,000 passengers a day, has since announced that the west London airport will be resuming some flights later today and “hope to run a full operation tomorrow.”

“Our teams have worked tirelessly since the incident to ensure a speedy recovery,” reads a statement from Heathrow.

“We’re pleased to say we’re now safely able to begin some flights later today. Our first flights will be repatriation flights and relocating aircraft.”

“Passengers are advised not to travel to the airport and should contact their airline for further information. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

According to live flight-tracking website Flightradar24, at least 120 aircraft were en route to the airport, which connects London with over 230 destinations in nearly 90 countries, when the unexpected closure was announced.

Heathrow is currently the base for 90 different airlines, including the UK’s flag carrier British Airways and Virgin Atlantic.

“As the busiest airport in Europe, Heathrow uses as much energy as a small city, therefore getting back to a full and safe operation takes time,” the spokesperson added.

Data from aviation analytics firm Cirium indicates that 615 flights are scheduled to depart from Heathrow on Saturday, with a further 604 flights due to fly to the airport.

So how long is the disruption from the closure likely to last for?

“The impact of this incident can cascade over several days, as aircraft, crew, passengers are out of place, with limited spare aircraft and seats available to recover passengers,” says the analytics firm.

Airplanes remain parked on the tarmac at Heathrow International Airport after a nearby fire wiped out the power at the airport.

Paul Charles, CEO of the PC Agency, a leading travel consultancy based in London, has suggested that the disruption may last up to a week before returning to normal.

“I would expect (Heathrow) by tomorrow to have some power back on stream, but the longer this goes on, the more the costs mount up, the more disruption for passengers, of course, and I would expect it to be a week at this rate before things are back to normal,” Charles told CNN’s Becky Anderson.

“You will not be able to go back to all systems operating as normal in one fell swoop,” he said.

Charles estimates that losses for airlines affected by the airport shutdown could run up to $25 to 35 million.

“That is based on all airlines being affected. … This is every single airline that flies in and out of Heathrow with 290,000 passengers, both in and outbound during a 24-hour period,” he said.

Charles points out that costs would include planes being out of place, the extra fuel required to move the planes and crew around, as well as extra costs for passengers, such as car hire and extra hotel accommodation.

Brett Snyder, who runs a concierge air travel assistance service and website named Cranky Flier, describes the situation as “shocking,” noting that the closure will “absolutely’ have a ripple effect on other airports and airlines.

“It is definitely going to be a mess that needs to be untangled,” he said.

Snyder stresses that “there’s no way to know” how long the effects of the closure may last, at this stage, explaining that it depends on how long it takes for Heathrow to resume normal operations.

He added that British Airways passengers would likely see the largest effects on their travel plans, while the the outage will “probably not be that big of an issue” for those traveling on US airlines.

As the outage took place before the summer spike in travel, airlines may have more “excess capacity to help get passengers where they need to go,” he said.

“Customers due to travel from Heathrow on Friday are advised not to travel to the airport until further notice,” reads a statement from British Airways on Friday.

“This will clearly have a significant impact on our operation and our customers and we’re working as quickly as possible to update them on their travel options for the next 24 hours and beyond.”

Flights have been diverted to alternative destinations wherever possible, with airports at Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Germany’s Frankfurt, Ireland’s Shannon and Gatwick Airport, the UK’s second largest airport, already accepting several.

Seven United Airlines flights have returned to their point of origin or been diverted to other airports, according to the American carrier.

“During the closure of London Heathrow airport, United is offering flexibility to customers with a travel waiver allowing them to switch eligible flights to Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris or Edinburgh,” the airline said in a statement on Friday, adding that it expected “to operate most scheduled Friday departures to London.”

Singapore Airlines has confirmed that three flights en route to London have either been diverted to Frankfurt or Paris or returned to Singapore. Five flights to and from Heathrow have since been canceled, said the airline.

Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific told CNN that several flights to and from London were canceled Friday.

Air France canceled eight flights to and from Heathrow, but the flag carrier of France says routes to other UK airports are operating normally.

“If you are traveling to or from London Heathrow today, please do not proceed to your departure airport at this time,” Virgin Atlantic said, adding that it would be “offering flexible options” to allow customers to adapt their travel plans.

“You can choose to be rebooked onto the next available flight, reschedule your journey for a later date, or change your destination within our direct network. If you no longer wish to travel, you may also request a refund,” the airline’s website recently added.

Low-cost airline Ryanair has launched eight “rescue flights” between Dublin and London Stansted to help affected passengers, with four operating Friday, and another four on Saturday.

Passenger Kim Mikkel Skibrek, a 40-year-old US-Norwegian citizen, was on a Delta Air Lines flight from the US to London when it had to turn back to Minneapolis after just three hours.

Firefighters at the scene following a major fire at the North Hyde electricity substation, which has caused a significant power outage at Heathrow Airport.

“Everything is fine,” he told CNN. “People were frustrated with the flight returning after over three hours but now it seems everyone is calmer.”

Skibrek says he’s hoping to be able to board another flight to London as soon as possible.

“The situation at Heathrow Airport is incredibly difficult, an incident like this at one of the world’s busiest airports will have a very significant knock-on impact on all travel for the next few days,” Julia Lo Bue-Said, chief executive officer of the Advantage Travel Partnership, said in a statement.

“Of course, the priority for everyone is safety, and the airport and the airlines will be working hard today to make sure the area is safe and that they can resume operations as soon as possible.”

Lo Bue-Said went on to point out that Friday is “typically the busiest day for travel,” and the incident will undoubtedly have a knock on effect.

“Therefore, the reality is that the London airports would have been busy today already and this incident will exacerbate it further,” she added.

Shukor Yusof, founder of Singapore-based Endau Analytics, an advisory firm focused on the aviation industry, told CNN that financial losses from the shutdown could be in the “hundreds of millions of pounds.”

The fallout “will cause chaos, undoubtedly, for the weekend and into next week because they have to resolve all those flights that couldn’t come in, all those problems that have piled up because of this shutdown,” he said.

A record-breaking 83.9 million passengers passed through Heathrow in 2024, according to recent data.



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Scotland faces up to its drug crisis by offering the UK’s first supervised injection facility

Published

10 hours ago

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July 11, 2025

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CNN
 — 

In a quiet corner of Glasgow’s East End, a radical public health experiment is underway. For the first time in the United Kingdom, people who inject illicit drugs such as heroin and cocaine can do so under medical supervision – in a safe environment and indoors.

No arrests. No judgment. No questions about where the drugs came from – only how to make their use less deadly.

The facility, known as the Thistle, opened in January amid mounting political and public health pressure to confront Scotland’s deepening drug crisis. With the highest rate of drug-related deaths in Europe, Scottish health officials say, there have long been calls for a more pragmatic, compassionate response.

Funded by the devolved Scottish government and modelled on more than 100 similar sites across Europe and North America, the pilot safe drug consumption facility marks a significant departure from the UK’s traditionally punitive approach to illegal drug use.

Dorothy Bain, who heads Scotland’s prosecution service and advises the government, told a UK parliamentary committee in May that “it would not be in the public interest to prosecute users of the Glasgow safer drug consumption facility for possession of drugs for personal use.”

She added that the approach would be kept under review to ensure it “is not causing difficulties, raising the risk of further criminality or having an unlawful impact on the community.”

Supporters describe it as a long-overdue shift toward harm reduction. Critics warn it risks becoming a place where damaging addiction is maintained, not treated.

Located in a low-slung clinical building near the city center, the Thistle is a space where individuals bring their own drugs, prepare them on site, and inject under the watchful eyes of trained staff.

The service provides no substances, nor does it allow drug sharing between users. What it offers instead is clean equipment, medical oversight, and a protected environment for a population who might otherwise use in alleyways, public toilets or dumpster sheds, with the associated risks for themselves and the wider community.

“We’ve had almost 2,500 injections inside the facility,” Dr. Saket Priyadarshi, the clinical lead of the Thistle, told a CNN team who visited the facility in early June. “That’s 2,500 less injections in the community, in parks, alleyways, car parks.”

sakat intw.jpg

Dr. Saket Priyadarshi tells CNN about types of drug use at the Thistle

00:27

All users must register before receiving support, providing only their initials and date of birth. Staff ask what drugs they plan to use and how. Then, they observe – not intervene – ready to act in the event of an emergency.

“We’ve had to manage over 30 medical emergencies inside the facility,” Priyadarshi said. “Some of them were severe overdoses that most likely would have ended in fatalities if we hadn’t been able to respond to them immediately here.”

Nurses work with patients to reduce harm wherever possible, advising on injection technique, equipment, and vein placement.

“We’ll spend a bit of time with them. Just (to) try and get the vein finder working,” said Lynn MacDonald, the service manager at the facility, referring to a handheld device that uses infrared light to illuminate veins beneath the skin.

“People have often learnt technique from other people who are using it and it’s not particularly good,” she told CNN. With equipment such as vein finders, she said, the staff at the Thistle are able to highlight “better” sites of injection to “reduce harm and make the injection safer.”

Service manager Lynn MacDonald demonstrates how to use the vein finder.

The Scottish government told CNN that the service has already delivered results in terms of public health.

“Through the ability of staff to respond quickly in the event of an overdose, the Thistle service has already saved lives,” Scottish health secretary Neil Gray said. The service, he said, is “helping to protect people against blood-borne viruses and taking used needles off the street.”

The Thistle bears little resemblance to a medical clinic. There are no fluorescent white lights, no clinical uniforms, and no sterile white rooms. Even the language has been reimagined: users aren’t brought into “interview rooms,” but welcomed into “chat rooms.”

The space itself is soft and deliberate, – furnished with books, jigsaws, warm lighting and a café-style area where people can sit, drink tea, shower, or have their clothes washed.

“The whole service is just designed to that ethos of treating people with a bit of dignity, a bit of respect, bringing them in, making them feel welcome,” Macdonald told CNN. “We want them to leave knowing somebody cares about them and we’re looking forward to seeing them safe and well again.”

For Margaret Montgomery, whose son Mark began using heroin at 17, the existence of the Thistle offers a degree of solace that once felt impossible.

Margaret Montgomery says her son struggled with drug addiction for 30 years.

Now in his fifties, Mark is no longer using – but it took years, and distance, to get there.

“My son went into treatment and it’s like six weeks, three months, six months. That’s not enough time. There’s no aftercare,” Montgomery told CNN.

She added that she’d asked her son whether he would have used the Thistle “all those years ago.”

“He said, ‘yes, I probably would have used it because of the other facilities that they’re offering in there.’” Mark declined to speak with CNN himself but was happy for his mother to recount his experience.

What the Thistle represents, for Montgomery, is not approval – but reprieve. “Nobody wants to think their children are taking drugs anywhere,” she said. “There must be parents that are sat out there and they’re going, ‘well thank god he’s going in there and he’s doing that in there, not in a bin shed.’”

Her support is unflinching – and practical. She is the chairperson of a family support group that was consulted about the Thistle.

“I think the Thistle’s the best thing that’s happened in Glasgow,” she told CNN.

‘Ethical and moral question’

Others see the facility not as an act of compassion, but as a quiet surrender.

Annemarie Ward, who has been in recovery for 27 years, believes that without a clear route to abstinence, harm reduction risks becoming a form of institutionalized maintenance.

“Have we given up trying to help people? Are we just trying to maintain people’s addictions now?” she told CNN.

Ward, who is from Glasgow, is the chief executive of the charity Faces and Voices of Recovery UK (Favor UK), and a campaigning voice for better access and treatment choices for those seeking help with addiction.

For Ward, the danger lies not in what the Thistle does, but in what it omits: a vision of freedom from dependency. Without that, she argues, the ethics of such facilities become blurred.

Discarded paraphernalia used by drug users is pictured in Glasgow in December 2020.

“If our whole system is focused on maintaining people’s addiction and not giving them the opportunity to exit that system,” she said, “I think there’s an ethical and moral question that we need to ask.”

The Thistle is “just prolonging the agony of addiction,” she said. “If you know anybody who’s suffered in that way or loved anybody that’s suffered that way you would see how inhumane this actually is.”

But Glasgow City Council says that the facility is one strand of a broader strategy.

The council says that the Thistle does not divert “from other essential alcohol and drug services in the city,” adding that the local authority “also invests heavily in treatment and care and recovery services.”

“Comparing these interventions is not helpful,” the council said in a statement. “All services are equally important – and needed – to allow us to support people who most need them.”

The idea itself is not new.

The world’s first safer drug consumption room opened in Switzerland in 1986 -– a clinical counterpoint to street-level chaos. Since then, the model has spread across Europe, from Portugal and the Netherlands to Germany, Denmark and Spain, and beyond to Canada and New York City.

The Thistle, the UK’s first iteration, operates 365 days a year, and shares its premises with addiction services and social care teams.

The

As of June, 71.9% of drugs injected inside were cocaine, with heroin making up a further 20%. The users are overwhelmingly male. Most have been injecting for years; all are at risk.

Still, resistance remains. CNN spoke to several people in the area who were concerned about the facility’s opening and said it had encouraged more drug users to come to the area in the six months since opening.

Others, however, told CNN that they had noticed there were fewer needles and less discarded drug paraphernalia on the ground since the clinic opened.

Chief Inspector Max Shaw, of Police Scotland, told CNN that the force was “aware of long-standing issues in the area” and was “committed to reducing the harm associated with problematic substance use and addiction.” He added that officers would continue to work with local communities to address concerns.

For the nurses, doctors and support staff who work in the building, the mission remains immediate: delivering potentially life-saving support to those in need.



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German tourist found alive 12 days after she was lost in the Australian Outback

Published

13 hours ago

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July 11, 2025

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Melbourne, Australia
AP
 — 

German tourist Carolina Wilga was found alive in Australia’s remote Outback on Friday, 12 days after she went missing and a day after her abandoned van was discovered, police said.

The last known sighting of the 26-year-old backpacker, and the last day family and friends heard from her, was June 29. She was seen at a general store in the wheat farming town of Beacon, 320 kilometers (200 miles) northeast of the Western Australia state capital Perth. Beacon had a population of 123 during the 2021 census.

A member of the public found Wilga wandering on a forest trail late Friday, Western Australia Police Force Insp. Martin Glynn said.

She was in a “fragile” state but had no serious injuries and was flown to a hospital in Perth for treatment, Glynn told reporters.

“I think once we do hear her story, it will be a remarkable story,” Glynn said, adding it was a “great result” for the backpacker’s family and those involved in the search.

“You know, she’s obviously coped in some amazing conditions,” he said. “There’s a very hostile environment out there, both from flora and fauna. It’s a really, really challenging environment to cope in.”

Carolina Wilga in an undated image posted to social media by police.

The reserve where Wilga was lost covers more than 300,000 hectares (740,000 acres). The Thursday-Friday overnight temperature was 2.6 degrees Celsius (36.7 Fahrenheit) in the area with no rain.

The crew of a police helicopter spotted her van Thursday in wilderness in the Karroun Hill Nature Reserve, 36 kilometers (22 miles) north of Beacon, Glynn said.

“Very difficult country. Huge area. So it’s a miracle they’ve actually spotted the car, to be honest,” Glynn told reporters before she was found.

Ground searchers on Friday scoured a heavily wooded radius of 300 meters (1,000 feet) beyond the van. Police assume Wilga’s van, a 1995 Mitsubishi Delica Star Wagon, became stuck in mud on the day she left Beacon, Glynn said.

The van, which has solar panels and reserves of drinking water, had recovery boards under its rear wheels that are used to give vehicles traction when they are stuck.

Police believed Wilga became lost and was not the victim of crime.

Australian serial killer Ivan Milat, who died in prison in 2019, notoriously kidnapped and murdered seven backpackers from 1989 to 1992, including three Germans, two Britons and two Australians.



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Ukrainian doctor drives a child’s heart through Russian attack to perform a life-saving transplant

Published

15 hours ago

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July 11, 2025

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CNN
 — 

Kyiv was burning as Dr. Borys Todurov sped through the city in an ambulance, undeterred by the deep thuds of explosions and the terrifying sounds of Russian drones flying overhead.

He was determined to deliver his precious cargo: a human heart.

Todurov’s patient – a child – was seriously ill in a hospital. He had hours to act.

The child has been living with a heart disease for several years, but her condition deteriorated earlier this week and Todurov knew a new heart was her only chance.

So when one became available from a child donor on the opposite side of the city, he didn’t wait for the Russians to stop attacking.

Russia has ramped up its aerial attacks against Ukraine in recent weeks. It fired more than 400 drones and 18 missiles, including eight ballistic and six cruise missiles overnight into Thursday.

As the Ukrainian authorities called on people to hide in bomb shelters and basements, Todurov and his staff made the 10-mile drive from the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in western Kyiv to the city’s Heart Institute on the eastern bank of the river while missiles and drones were flying around.

While the Ukrainian Air Force managed to shoot down or disable the vast majority of the drones and missiles, two people were killed and dozens more injured in the attack on Thursday.

Thursday’s mass attack on Kyiv was just the latest in a deadly string of Russian assaults. Just the day before, Moscow launched more than 700 drones – a new record – against Ukraine on a single night.

Todurov, the director of the Heart Institute, and his team worked non-stop throughout the two nights of attacks.

After performing a heart surgery at the institute on Wednesday, he traveled across the city to Okhmatdyt where he removed the heart from the body of the donor.

He then personally escorted the organ across the city.

Crossing the Dnipro by a bridge is extremely dangerous during an attack on Kyiv, because vehicles are exposed and Ukrainian air defences target Russian drones and missiles when they are above the river to minimise the impact from falling debris.

A video taken during the frantic drive shows a large fire burning near the road as Todurov drives on. “We’re carrying a heart,” he says calmly.

The Russian attack on the capital was still underway when Todurov got into the operating theater at the Heart Institute, heading a large medical team and transplanting the heart into the body of his patient.

In a stunning moment captured on camera and shared with CNN, the new heart is seen beating inside the patient’s chest, just hours after it was driven through Kyiv as Russian drones and missiles rained down on the city.

“The heart is working, and the pressure is stable. We hope that … (the patient) will recover and live a long and full life,” the doctor said.

The Ukrainian Transplant Coordination Centre said in a statement that the donor was a four-year-old girl who was declared brain-dead by a medical council after suffering serious injuries.

The girl’s mother, herself a medical worker, agreed to have her daughter’s organs donated.

And so, just as Todurov was transplanting the girl’s heart into his patient’s body at the Heart Institute, her kidneys were being transplanted to a 14-year-old boy and her liver to a 16-year-old girl, the center said. The two other patients were at the Okhmatdyt hospital, so no transport was required to get the organs to them.

The coordination center said that two of the three recipients were in critical condition and had they not received the transplants, they would have just days or weeks to live.

“May the little donor rest in peace. Our condolences to her family and gratitude for their difficult but important decision,” the center said.



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