April 29, 2025. Iberian Interruption.

I’ve had a few interesting experiences over the course of my career. We can now add nationwide power failure to the list.

On April 28th I was preparing to work a flight out of Lisbon, Portugal, when the entire country’s electrical grid crashed. I was standing in line at duty free, where I’d detoured to buy a bottle of Port. The lights suddenly flickered, dimmed, flickered again and then went dark.

A full day later, as I type this, swaths of Spain and Portugal are still without power.

Everything was down: computers, phones, wi-fi — pretty much all of the technology needed to get a commercial flight boarded and into the air. Yet somehow we managed to depart, albeit four hours late. Most of our passengers had already cleared immigration and security when the blackout happened, and our jet was already catered and fueled. Hundreds of other flights, and their tens of thousands of passengers, weren’t so lucky.

Our loading logistics had to be coordinated via satellite phone. At one point, a station agent came to the cockpit and spent upwards of an hour on our SATCOM system, calling in the names and seat numbers of more than two hundred passengers. We improvised where need be: I briefly managed to get a WhatsApp connection and was able to send photos of logbook pages to help resolve a paperwork snafu.

I was amazed we made it out, but we did, thanks mostly to the hard work of our local staff. Say what you want about airlines, but sometimes they pull it together.

Photo by Andrey Metelev, courtesy of Unsplash.