Heathrow Airport Fire: Thousands of passengers stranded

“Eleven hockey girls with a match tomorrow can’t make it back — the whole team is in Geneva,” she said.

While they were trying to back to London, Kazumi Nakamura and her 13-year-old daughter, Mana, were looking to leave and head home to the Canadian city of Vancouver.

While she was hoping to get new flights with Air Canada, Nakamura, 50, was relatively calm about the situation, as they waited in Paddington Station.

“It’s okay. We’re not in a rush,” Nakamura, 50, said. “But we want to go home.”

For others like Halleli Pinson, a professor of sociology of education at Israel’s Ben Gurion University, the situation was more frustrating.

Pinson, 51, was supposed to run two major sessions at an education conference in Chicago over the weekend, but her flight was canceled.

“I’m not only missing my own talk, I’m missing other responsibilities that I have,” Pinson told NBC News today in a telephone call. She added that the earliest her carrier, British Airways, could fly her to Chicago was Monday, but by then it would be too late.

Pinson’s sister, Shira Pinson, is a multimedia producer for NBC News who lives in London, said she will be able to “put up or put up with her sister.” But Halleli said she was “frustrated” with British Airways because they had not made “any efforts to put me on a different airline or a different flight.”

“I’m supposed to fly business class and I’m willing to fly a lower class — I just want to get to Chicago but they’re not willing to change that,” she said.

NBC News has approached British Airways for comment.