A grass fire broke out next to Heathrow's runway 27L shortly before midday on Saturday 5 September, forcing the airport onto single-runway operations for around an hour, in an incident separate from the rail-line fire that disrupted Heathrow's trains later that same day.
Heathrow's official Heathrow Runways account said on social media: "Grass area fire abeam runway 27L has closed the runway, we are now single runway ops on 27R UFN," according to airlive.net. Air traffic controllers redirected arriving and departing flights to runway 27R while airport fire crews and emergency services dealt with the blaze on the grass verge next to the tarmac.
A Heathrow spokesperson confirmed the closure and said it was resolved quickly. "Earlier today our teams acted quickly to safely resolve a grass fire adjacent to the southern runway," the spokesperson said, according to airlive.net. "Thanks to their swift response, the fire was extinguished quickly and both runways are fully operational." The Sun quoted a similar airport statement apologising for the disruption while safety checks were completed.
Airlive.net reported the fire was fully extinguished by 12:50pm local time, with Heathrow back to normal dual-runway operations shortly after. The closure caused knock-on delays for flights that had to be sequenced onto the single active runway during the shutdown, though normal operations resumed the same day.
This was a distinct incident from the fire that broke out beside the railway near Scrubs Lane in North Kensington later on Saturday afternoon, which knocked out power to the tracks