A second night of drone activity at Munich Airport grounded flights and left 6,500 passengers stranded on Friday, with disruption stretching into Saturday morning, and Germany’s Federal Police yet to identify a culprit.
A spokesperson for Munich Airport, Germany’s second busiest airport after Frankfurt, said 46 flights were canceled at the last minute, with stranded passengers forced to sleep on camp beds set up in the airport terminals.
A further 23 inbound flights had to be diverted to alternative airports, and 12 flights that were still to depart for Munich had to be canceled at their origin airport.
Drone sightings were first reported at 9:30 pm on September 3, with Germany’s air traffic control first restricting flight movements before suspending all operations.
On Thursday night, Munich was also shut down as a result of drone sightings, leading to the cancellation of 17 departing flights and the diversion of 15 flights that were in the air inbound to Munich.
Munich Airport normally stops all flight movements at midnight and resumes operations at 5:00 am but on Saturday morning, air traffic control still had restrictions in place due to the drone sightings, meaning that the disruption spilled into the weekend.
The airport warned that delays should be expected throughout Saturday and urged passengers to check with their airline that their flight was still going ahead as planned before making their way to the airport.
Munich is the latest European airport to have been hit by disruption caused by drone sightings. In late September, flights at Copenhagen and Oslo airports were disrupted by a coordinated drone attack that the Danish police said had been carried out by a “capable operator” with the “capabilities, the will, and the tools to show off in this way.”
The drone sightings came just days after several European Airports fell victim to a ransomware attack on a third-party software application that runs check-in, baggage handling, and boarding processes.
Isn’t there anti-drone technology to stop these incidents?
Yes, there are a number of systems available to the military and commercial operators to combat illegal drone activity. London Heathrow was one of the first airports in the world to install a permanent anti-drone system in 2020.
Also in use at Paris Charles de Gaulle, the system produced by Aveillant uses a holographic radar to identify drones as far as 5 km from the perimeter of the airport.
The system can’t stop the drones, but it can identify the location of the drone operator, allowing police to quickly intervene.
Could Russia be behind these drone attacks?
Is Russia seeking revenge for a wave of drone attacks on its own airports carried out over the summer? On just one weekend in July, Russia was forced to cancel 485 flights and delay thousands more due to mass drone sightings in Russian airspace.
Fearing the drones could pose a serious threat to civil aviation, Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency activated its so-called ‘carpet plan,’ which is effectively an emergency protocol for wide-sweeping and short-notice airspace closures.
Russian airports were impacted by the carpet plan multiple times this summer, and similar drone attacks occurred in the run-up to Christmas 2024.
In the aftermath of July’s flight mayhem, President Putin sacked his transport minister, Roman Starovoit.
Less than a day later, Starovoit was found dead with a gunshot wound to his head and a pistol lying by his body in a park on the outskirts of Moscow. Authorities claimed Starovoit’s death was a suicide.
