By BRIAN MELLEY, DANICA KIRKA and JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — A large fire near London’s Heathrow Airport knocked out power Friday to Europe’s busiest flight hub, forcing it to shut all day and disrupting global travel for hundreds of thousands of passengers.

At least 1,350 flights to and from Heathrow were affected, flight tracking service FlightRadar 24 said, and the impact was likely to last several days as passengers try to reschedule their travel and airlines work to get planes and crew to the right places.

Authorities do not know what caused the fire but so far found have no evidence it was suspicious.

Firefighters extinguish the fire at the North Hyde electrical substation, which caught fire Thursday night and lead to a closure of Heathrow Airport in London, Friday, March 21, 2025.(AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

Residents in west London described hearing a large explosion, followed by a fireball and clouds of smoke, when the blaze ripped through the electrical substation near the airport.

Some 120 flights were in the air when the closure was announced, with some turned around and others diverted to Gatwick Airport outside London, Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris or Ireland’s Shannon Airport, tracking services showed.

Lawrence Hayes was three-quarters of the way to London from New York when Virgin Atlantic announced they were being diverted to Glasgow.

“It was a red-eye flight and I’d already had a full day, so I don’t even know how long I’ve been up for,” Hayes told the BBC as he was getting off the plane in Scotland. “Luckily I managed to get hold of my wife and she’s kindly booked me a train ticket to get back to Euston, but it’s going to be an incredibly long day.”

Heathrow is one of the world’s busiest airports for international travel. It had its busiest January on record earlier this year, with more than 6.3 million passengers, up more than 5% from the same period last year.

Still, the disruption Friday fell short of the one caused by the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed clouds of ash into the atmosphere and created trans-Atlantic air travel chaos for months.

Fire under control but impact to last days

It was too early to determine what sparked the huge blaze about 2 miles (3 kilometers) from the airport, but there’s “no suggestion” of foul play, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said.

Firefighters extinguish the fire at the North Hyde electrical substation, which caught fire Thursday night and lead to a closure of Heathrow Airport in London, Friday, March 21, 2025.(AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

The London Fire Brigade was leading the investigation with help from the Metropolitan Police, officials said. A person familiar with the investigation said counterterrorism detectives were also involved as a matter of course because the cause was unknown. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly.

Miliband said the fire, which took seven hours to control, also knocked out a backup power supply to the airport. Heathrow said in a statement that it had no choice but to close the airport for the day.

“We expect significant disruption over the coming days, and passengers should not travel to the airport under any circumstances until the airport reopens,” the airport said.

Heathrow was at the heart of a shorter disruption in 2023 when Britain’s air traffic control system was hit by a breakdown that slowed takeoffs and landings across the U.K. on one of the busiest travel days of the year.

Anita Mendiratta, an aviation consultant, said the impact of the closure will be felt over two to four days as airlines, cargo carriers, and crews are moved into position and passengers rebooked.

“As soon as the airport opens up at midnight tonight, it’s not only about resuming with tomorrow’s flights, it’s the backlog and the implications that have taken place,” Mendiratta said. “Crew and aircraft, many are not where they’re supposed to be right now. So the recalculation of this is going to be intense.”

Diverted, canceled and in limbo

At Heathrow, a family of five traveling to Dallas showed up in the hopes their flight home — still listed as delayed — would take off.

FILE – Airplanes are seen at the Heathrow Airport in London, May 27, 2023. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung, File)

But when Andrea Sri brought her brother, sister-in-law and their three children to the airport, they were told by police that there would be no flight.

“It was a waste of time. Very confusing,” said Sri, who lives in London. “We tried to get in touch with British Airways, but they don’t open their telephone line until 8 a.m.”

Travelers who were diverted to other cities found themselves trying to book travel onward to London. Qantas airlines sent flights from Singapore and Perth, Australia, to Paris, where it said it would bus people to London, a process likely to also include a train shuttle beneath the English Channel.

Budget airline Ryanair, which doesn’t operate out of Heathrow, said it added eight “rescue flights” between Dublin and Stansted, another London airport, to transport stranded passengers Friday and Saturday.

National Rail canceled all trains to and from the airport.

Flights normally begin landing and taking off at Heathrow at 6 a.m. due to nighttime flying restrictions. But the skies were silent Friday morning.

“Living near Heathrow is noisy, there are planes every 90 seconds or so, plus the constant hum of traffic, but you get used to it, to the point of no longer noticing,” said James Henderson, who has lived next to the airport for more than 20 years. “Today is different, you can hear the birds singing.”

Blaze lit up the sky and darkened homes

Matthew Muirhead was working Thursday night near Heathrow when he stepped outside with a colleague and noticed smoke rising from an electrical substation and heard sirens crying out.

“We saw a bright flash of white, and all the lights in town went out,” he said.

The London Fire Brigade sent 10 engines and around 70 firefighters to control the blaze and about 150 people were evacuated from their homes near the power station.

“This was a very visible and significant incident, and our firefighters worked tirelessly in challenging conditions to bring the fire under control as swiftly as possible,” Assistant Commissioner Pat Goulbourne said.

Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks said in a post on X the power outage affected more than 16,300 homes.

The U.K. government earlier this year approved building a third runway at the airport to boost the economy and connectivity to the world.

Associated Press writers Stefanie Dazio in Berlin and Yirmiyan Arthur in Kohima, India, contributed.

Martin Scorsese’s rueful, poignant 2019 film “The Irishman,” starring longtime collaborator Robert De Niro, was a reflection on (or perhaps even a eulogy for) the kind of gangster film that the pair made famous, like Scorsese saying farewell to the genre, ruminating on what it means to tell stories about men of violence.

But if you thought De Niro was out, he’s back in for one last job (for now), reuniting with another frequent collaborator, director Barry Levinson, for the mob movie “The Alto Knights,” scripted by “Goodfellas” and “Casino” screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi.

But there’s a catch, a gimmick even, as De Niro stars opposite himself, playing both Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, the notorious Italian American mafiosi. It was a seismic moment when De Niro and Al Pacino shared the screen for the first time over coffee in Michael Mann’s epic 1995 crime drama “Heat,” and similar moments are presented here as De Niro faces off against himself, though they don’t have the same electricity as De Niro vs. Pacino.

As you’re reminded of these other films, it becomes clear that “The Alto Knights” is more interesting in the context of Robert De Niro’s filmography than it is necessarily as a stand-alone picture. Like “The Irishman,” there’s a reflective quality to the film as a meditation on mob movies. It’s a reminder that De Niro is one of one, that his presence as an actor and signifier of the gangster film looms so large that only he could play the iconic roles of Costello and Genovese. There simply isn’t anyone else who could go toe-to-toe with him, other than himself.

In De Niro’s take on Genovese, it almost seems like he’s doing an imitation of Joe Pesci, his co-star in “Goodfellas,” “Casino” and “The Irishman.” Heavily made up as both Costello and Genovese, it takes awhile to sync up with and settle into his performances, though to his credit, the artifice fades away over the course of the runtime.

To try and run down the various trials and tribulations of the Genovese crime family during the first half of the 20th century would be a fool’s errand, and both Levinson and Pileggi recognize that, focusing on a few key events in the story of the longtime relationship between Costello and Genovese — namely, Genovese’s botched hit on his childhood friend Costello in 1957 — while glossing over most of the backstory in rapid-fire montage.

The story is told nonlinearly and with a larger narrative framing device in which De Niro as an elderly Costello delivers a documentary-style talking head interview to an unseen interviewer, which serves as the voice-over narration for the film. Levinson animates many of Costello’s monologues about his life and work with a blend of archival and faux-archival photographs and footage, creating and then animating snapshots of history as a nod to the authenticity of this true-life tale.

These busy stylistic and storytelling tics, as well as the double De Niro, are a bit distracting, but by the time “The Alto Knights” arrives at its blockbuster scenes, it’s easy to be transported by Levinson’s deft filmmaking and De Niro’s performances. While the assassination attempt is the main event around which the film revolves, it’s a Senate hearing on organized crime, and then later, an upstate New York gathering of the bosses that Costello snitches on that prove to be the most fascinating sequences of “The Alto Knights.”

The film sings when it’s in action, whether it’s Costello breaking with the family’s oath of silence and choosing not to plead the Fifth during his Senate testimony, or in a patient, amusing scene of Costello delaying his arrival at the countryside meeting in order to avoid being gathered up in a police sweep that he set into motion. It stalls out when it gets bogged down in the backroom conversations that dwell in the details of betrayal and double-crosses.

But as much as “The Alto Knights” is a meta-commentary on mob movies — specifically De Niro mob movies — it’s also just a classic Mafia film that fans of the genre can enjoy. It’s a treat to watch all these older character actors gathered to slip into their wise guy accents, and Cosmo Jarvis (of “Shōgun”) is a standout, and nearly unrecognizable, as Vincent Gigante.

“The Alto Knights” doesn’t quite reach the emotional and existential heights of “The Irishman,” but it has a similar tone, looking back on a long career of (cinematic) violence. There’s an observation at the end that this was the only way for immigrants in the 20th century to grasp at the American dream, an idea that churns within all American gangster movies. This curio of a film could have gone deeper into what it means to be a gangster, but its core themes resonate all the same.

‘The Alto Knights’

2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for violence and pervasive language)

Running time: 2:00

How to watch: In theaters on Friday, March 21

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said late Thursday that he would be meeting with billionaire Elon Musk at the Pentagon Friday to discuss “innovation, efficiencies & smarter production.”

Musk, a top adviser to President Donald Trump, and his Department of Government Efficiency have played an integral role in the administration’s push to dramatically reduce the size of the government. Musk has faced intense blowback from some lawmakers and voters for his chainsaw-wielding approach to laying off workers and slashing programs, although Trump’s supporters have hailed it.

A senior defense official told reporters Tuesday that roughly 50,000 to 60,000 civilian jobs will be cut in the Defense Department.

In a post on Musk’s X platform, Hegseth emphasized that “this is NOT a meeting about ‘top secret China war plans,’” denying a story published by The New York Times late Thursday.

Hegseth is also scheduled to deliver remarks with Trump at the White House Friday morning.