LONDON – Throngs of passengers anxious to get on their way surged into Heathrow Airport in London on March 22, a day after a power blackout closed the airport and forced thousands to delay their trips.

As information boards flickered back to life, an army of extra airport staff members, dressed in purple, sprang into action to help people as they walked through the terminal doors.

Mr Ganesh Suresh, a 25-year-old student who was trying to get home to Bangalore, India, was among those who secured a coveted seat on a Saturday flight. After his Air India flight was cancelled, his parents booked new tickets on Virgin Atlantic while he spent the night at a friend’s place in Birmingham, England.

“I was so eager to get back,” Mr Suresh said. He sheepishly admitted to yelling at his parents in frustration during the height of the shutdown chaos. “I might apologise to them when I get back.”

Travellers, diverted or rebooked, arrived early, with trains and other transport routes to the airport reopened. A day earlier, the airport’s roads were empty except for police cars.

A Heathrow representative said on March 22 that the airport was “open and fully operational”, adding that the extra flights on the day’s schedule could accommodate 10,000 extra passengers.

At the airport, information boards showed that most flights would leave on time, but the snaking lines at ticketing counters signalled that many travellers were in for more frustrating delays.

More than 1,000 flights were diverted on March 21, wreaking havoc on more than 250,000 people’s travel plans, Cirium, an aviation data company, estimated.

Some travellers chose not to wait for a flight out of Heathrow. Ms Denyse Kumbuka had lingered in the dimmed Terminal 2 for as long as she could on March 21, spending hours on a bench trying to find her way back home to Dallas.

Then her husband found a seat for her on a flight via Austria. She navigated the London Underground rail system to St. Pancras International train station and got a train to Paris. After spending the night on another bench at Charles de Gaulle Airport, she took an early flight to Vienna, then con...