Doha is not alone. Etihad opened a new terminal, admittedly long overdue, in Abu Dhabi last year. Dubai is expanding with a plan to demolish and rebuild. Istanbul’s new airport opened five years ago and is winning awards.

New aesthetically pleasing, purpose-built airports are popping up across Asia. China is building 260 by 2020. Riyadh wants to ‘out-Dubai’ Dubai in five years. This, they tell us anyway, is the future of air travel.

Then, at midnight on Thursday, came a smoky reminder of the past. 

Three lessons from Heathrow

By 2.30am yesterday morning, three things were becoming apparent to everyone involved with Irish and European aviation.

The first is that we are overly reliant on an English airport which has been plagued by decades of underinvestment. One accident was able to blow the plug, literally, on the airport’s power supply and close it down.

The second is that we are not as independent as we like to believe when it comes to connectivity.

Dublin has far more connections than it did 20 years ago — over 100 at this stage — but even it is dependent on Heathrow (17 flights a day), rather than the alternative hubs (total 22 flights a day).

Outside of Dublin it is worse. Ryanair enjoys an unhealthy dominance of our provincial airports. All but a handful of routes from Cork, Kerry, Shannon, and Knock are Ryanair. The flights to connecting hubs, particularly as KLM looks likely to retreat from Cork, are almost all to Heathrow.

And the third is that even the most advanced rebooking systems struggle to cope with disruption of this scale, despite artificial intelligence (AI) and all the digital advances of recent years.

Most of the 5,500 or so Irish passengers due to fly out on Friday were passing through Heathrow en route to somewhere else. Rebooking one sector is complicated. Rebooking four even more so. And multiply that by 200,000 passengers. It may be Tuesday before we have sorted out the mess created by a single day’s stoppage at Heathrow.

Passengers can, at least, rest assured that things will get back to normal and they will be brought to where they are supposed to go, despite how many connections there are (if booked on the same ticket).

We cannot be so sure, on an island so dependent on the airport next door.

Heathrow is proud of trotting out statistics designed to show it is still a world leader amongst aviation hubs. 

The problem is that Heathrow is a hub of the past, as most European hubs are.

It was a success because of geography, situated between then world’s number one aviation market (by a margin) the US, and the second largest, Europe. As both markets grew, so did Heathrow. By the 1970s it was comparing itself to its American cousins.

Things have changed. The world’s largest aviation market now is Asia. 

Middle Eastern carriers and hubs are filling the role that Heathrow and its European competitors, Amsterdam, Paris and Frankfurt once did.

Two flagship projects at Heathrow, the new Terminal 2 and Terminal 5 have disguised the fact that, behind it all, Heathrow’s infrastructure is creaking.

Oddly enough, this is the second time in recent months that Ireland got its own reminder of how creaking infrastructure can disconnect us.

The collapse of Holyhead pier in December was the result of decades of under-investment, dating back to the days that Margaret Thatcher handed over the ports to Tory party donor James Sherwood.

The failure of England’s air traffic control system in 2023 was another indication that all is not well under the bonnet.

Every flight undergoes a thorough check and workaround by the captain before it takes off. After yesterday, there is not much confidence that Heathrow would pass either.

• Eoghan Corry is an aviation and travel writer