Manchester Airport power cut: what went wrong?

A sudden power cut followed by a surge of returning electricity early this morning - possibly more than once - lays behind a day of travel chaos at Manchester Airport.

It has meant the travel plans of thousands of passengers were thrown into turmoil because of the outage, which hit key baggage and security systems in Terminals 1 and 2

All flights out of those terminal were cancelled 'until further notice' with passengers told to stay away from both terminals after the outage.

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Although the airport's back-up generator kicked in when the main system went down, the situation was complicated by power cutting out multiple times and then resuming. Like re-booting a computer that hasn't been turned off properly, getting back to normal has proved difficult.

Power has since been restored but baggage and security systems are continuing to be affected. Airport officials were hoping that all systems would be working as normal by this evening although the knock-on effects could still be felt by airlines tomorrow. Passengers awaiting flights tonight are being urged to check with their airlines before turning up.

The airport is the size of a small town and effectively has its own power supply, separate from the power that feeds surrounding areas like Wythenshawe and Styal.

This morning, that supply failed but then resumed. The surge of returning power - which airport officials may have occurred more than once - damaged physical infrastructure. The combination of a power cut and damaged infrastructure complicated engineers' efforts to get the airport back up and running.

One key issue was that the power cut affected baggage handling and - more importantly - security, and