BAA boss Colin Matthews has apologised to Heathrow’s passengers as the Government announces an inquiry into Britain’s transport failure after the snow chaos is over.

Matthews said he was “really disappointed we have disrupted so many people’s Christmas plans”.

And he told the BBC Today programme that “he couldn’t be more sorry” about the situation, and added that there would be a “forensic analysis” of Heathrow’s ability to cope with the bad weather in the upcoming weeks.

“We are well set up to cope with what we are used to having in the UK,” he added.

But it has been revealed that at London Gatwick, which has coped better with the adverse weather, more snow ploughs were ordered earlier this month and it is set to have as much snow clearing machinery as Oslo within a couple of months.

Matthews admitted that “it may well be that we have under invested”.

Meanwhile, while Matthews advised travellers not to come to Heathrow airport until they had checked with their airline, many airlines’ websites were collapsing under the onslaught of enquiries. British Airways put out an apology for problems with its website via its Twitter feed.

Other London airports appeared to be coping better with the weather, and a Gatwick spokesperson said it was returning to normal today.

But this afternoon Heathrow was issuing warnings saying terminals 1 and 3 were full and passengers should not travel to those terminals until further notice.

Transport Secretary Philip Hammond promised a thorough investigation of how Britain’s infrastructure coped during the extremely cold weather, once the worst was over.

But Hammond faced criticism from Labour about why it hadn’t put an emergency plan with 43 recommendations into action.

And London mayor Boris Johnson has called on BAA to pull out all the stops to get Heathrow moving again, and questioned why so few aircraft took off even after it stopped snowing.

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