London Heathrow London Heathrow Airport

Heathrow is the largest international airport in the city of London. Located 24 km (15 miles) west of central London. It includes 5 passenger terminals and one cargo terminal.

History

2022: Introduction of the limit for daily departures - no more than 100 thousand people

London Heathrow Airport in July 2022 asked airlines to stop selling tickets for the summer to avoid chaos. Until September 11, the largest British air hub introduces a limit on daily traffic - no more than 100,000 departing passengers.

2020: Reduced passenger traffic

London Heathrow Airport and Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport in 2020 served just over 22 million people each. That means European leaders in terms of congestion could be squeezed by Istanbul's new airport, which opened in April 2019. In 2020, it served 23.4 million passengers. Read more here.

2017: Heathrow security data found in flash drive found

As it became known in October 2017, an unknown person found a flash drive on the ground, which revealed detailed information about the security systems of the UK's largest Heathrow airport.^[1]

Heathrow Airport is leading an internal investigation into the flash drive incident

According to the Daily Mail journalists, who were given the "flash drive," 76 files with a total volume of 2.5 gigabytes were located on it, containing information about the security measures taken to protect Queen Elizabeth II and the country's top politicians when using the airport, as well as anti-terrorist measures. In particular, the storage unit showed maps of the location of security cameras, tunnels, emergency exit shafts, as well as patrol schemes and a description of the ultrasonic radar system used to scan the perimeter and tarmac.

The person who found the flash drive claims that it was lying in foliage in Queens Park. The data on it was not encrypted in any way, no passwords or other methods of preserving privacy were observed.

How such a large amount of secret, in fact, information turned out to be on a flash drive lying on the ground is not clear. No one can rule out that there were more than one such flash drive.

The leak of such information is potentially a disaster for the security of the entire airport, says Oleg Galushkin, an information security expert at SEC Consult Services. - The effectiveness of surveillance systems depends at least in part on the confidentiality of their information, and this information should in no way be stored without encryption or other protection.

The airport administration, however, has already stated that it is confident in the effectiveness of its security protocols. As for the data breach, the airport launched an internal investigation with the intention of finding out how this could have happened and preventing relapses.

We analysed the airport security protocol and are confident Heathrow remains secure, the airport authority said in a statement. - The UK in general and Heathrow in particular use air safety protocols, among the most robust in the world, and we remain vigilant against new threats by adjusting procedures on a daily basis.

In any case, a serious correction of these procedures will be needed now. The airport is also waiting for serious image losses and, most likely, an investigation of the incident at the level of the Government and Parliament.

1986

All British Concordes. 1986 Heathrow Airport.