Drone alert at Berlin airport: flights suspended for two hours, hijackings, and chaos among passengers

For almost two hours yesterday evening, October 31st, Berlin Brandenburg Airport was paralysed due to thesighting of an unidentified drone near the airport. An episode that hforced the authorities to suspend all take-offs and landings between 20.08pm and 21.58pm and to divert numerous flights to other German cities.

The news was given by an airport spokesperson, who said: spoke of “a whole series of flights” being diverted during the temporary closure. Some planes headed to the German capital were diverted to the airports of Leipzig, Hamburg and Hannover, while others had to remain on the ground waiting for the airspace to reopen.

The sighting and police confirmation

The alarm was raised following the report from a witness who reported seeing a drone in the vicinity of the airport. Shortly after, a Police patrol confirmed the sighting. The spokeswoman for the Brandenburg police from Potsdam clarified “it is no longer flying at the moment” and has not been located since, adding that Investigations to trace the origin and possible operator of the drone are still ongoing.

Currently no hypothesis is excluded: from the action of a single individual to an intentional act of disturbance. The German authorities have It should be remembered that the flight of drones in the vicinity of airports is strictly prohibited by European aviation safety legislation.

Flight chaos and stranded passengers

During the two-hour suspension, air traffic was completely disrupted. Some flights to Basel, Oslo, and Barcelona have been canceled or postponed. A flight from London was diverted to Hamburg, according to the German news agency dpa. the pilot would have informed the passengers of the diversion explicitly motivated by the drone's activity. Similar situations have also occurred for flights arriving from Stockholm, Antalya and Helsinki. The airport's scoreboards they marked chain delays, with dozens of passengers forced to wait for hours for information and alternative connections.

An increasingly frequent problem

The Berlin-Brandenburg incident is part of a series of similar incidents that have affected several European airports in recent weeks. Only at the beginning of October, a drone had forced the temporary suspension of flights at the airport of Monaco of Bavaria, the second largest in Germany.