I don't imagine an american being so dismissive about JFK being taken offline.
Is it, really ?
From Heathrow's own website[1], so we can expect figures on the "generous" side:
"Heathrow Airport is expected to contribute approximately £4.7bn to the UK economy "
This incident started somewhere around midnight and is currently estimated to be resolved by 15:00. So let's round that up to "one day".
£4.7bn divided by 365 is £12.8m
Compared to say, the UK financial services sector which contributed £208.2bn to the UK economy in 2023[2] where an equivalent day out would cost £570m .... Heathrow's paltry £12m is equivalent to a 30 minute outage in the financial sector.
Also, to put it further into perspective - Tesco, the UK's biggest supermarket operator - had revenues of £68bn last year...[3]
[1]https://www.heathrow.com/content/dam/heathrow/web/common/doc... [2]https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06... [3] https://companiesmarketcap.com/gbp/tesco/revenue/
Just to downplay the importance of Heathrow through numbers is a bit absurd.
It’s just delays, not destruction.
If we're going to be pedantic about fair comparisons, then really you would need to, for example:
Remove airport duty-free sales figures since that has a negligible effect on the UK economy, but does pad up their bottom line.
Remove leisure passenger derived numbers. Because "passenger tourism contributes to the UK economy" type data are very much finger in the air subjective estimates prone to bias and massaging. For example, common scenario is relatives coming to stay. They stay at your house, you feed them at your house, their net contribution to the UK economy is effectively naff all apart from maybe a couple of museum and transport tickets.
What will be telling here is how quickly things adapt to the disruption. I expect to feel more impact from the loss of power to businesses in the surrounding area that are involved in air shipment than in the flight disruptions (e.g. cold chain logistics and inventory management for just-in-time processes that warehouse near the airport.)
Most people won't have to. The substation area covers 62,000 properties, but only 4,800 are actually without power as a result of the incident. In addition they are expecting restoration of power by 15:00 same-day.[1]
You'll need to back up that assertion.
I imagine any American who thought about it would have a similarly 'dismissive' attitude.
