Germany’s Munich airport halted flights after several drone sightings, a police spokesperson told AFP early on Friday, October 3rd. The cancellations happened in a string of similar aviation disruptions across Europe.
The incident comes ahead of the final weekend of Germany’s Oktoberfest, which draws hundreds of thousands of people every day to Munich and which itself has been targeted this year in a gun and arson rampage.
The airport said in a statement that 17 flights departing Munich were cancelled on Thursday night, October 2nd, affecting nearly 3,000 passengers, and 15 flights due to land were diverted to other cities. The airport did not specify when flights will resume.
Several people spotted drones around the airport at about 7:30 p.m. on October 2nd, and again an hour later, leading to the closure of both runways for an hour, the police spokesperson told AFP. German authorities have launched a search to identify the origin of the drones.
Police helicopters were deployed but “no information is available on the type and number of drones,” the spokesperson said.
Germany is on high alert over the threat of drones after sightings in other European countries caused airports to shut down including in Copenhagen, Oslo and Warsaw. Poland and Denmark have suggested that Russia is to blame for the disruptions.
The 27 EU member states met in Copenhagen on Thursday, October 2nd, to discuss bolstering the bloc’s defences with the establishment of a “drone wall”.
German authorities have warned of a growing drone threat, saying a swarm of drones had flown over the country last week, including over military and industrial sites. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said Germany needed to “find new responses to this hybrid threat”—including potentially shooting down the drones.
On Thursday night, October 2nd, fifteen drones were spotted above the Elsenborn military base in eastern Belgium, close to the German border. The base functions as an army training site, which includes a security zone for live-fire exercises across a 28-square-kilometer area.
VRT NWS reports that the detection was made by a test system for drone monitoring that had been installed there by coincidence. After being detected, the drones are said to have flown from Belgium into Germany, where police also observed them over the small German town of Düren.
It is still unknown who controlled the drones or where they originated from. The Belgian Ministry of Defence is currently investigating the case.
