EINDHOVEN, the Netherlands — Eindhoven Airport blocked all civilian and military flights for several hours on Saturday evening, creating chaos for hundreds of passengers and halting a range of cargo operations. After multiple drones were seen near the runway and flying overhead toward the nearby Volkel air force base, Nov. 22, 2025, officials at both airports – in civilian as well as military hands – activated a joint security protocol.
Outgoing Dutch Defence Minister Ruben Brekelmans said traffic at the base — which is used to support the UN mission in Mali during peacemaking mission and is not involved in combat — restarted just after 11 p.m. local time, about two hours after it was first announced on X site as being shut down.“Defence has taken measures. He said no further detail could be given for security reasons,” he added, without saying how many drones the government had detected or from where.
The shutdown rattled a 24-hour roller-coaster for the Dutch military, after air-defense units detected and fired on drones over Volkel air force base Friday evening, about 40 kilometers northeast of Eindhoven, in an earlier incident that officials said was under investigation.
Eindhoven Airport, which operates from a shared runway with a Dutch Royal Air Force base hosting Dutch F-35 jets and a U.S. Air Force detachment, halted all forms of air travel — holiday charters, mail runs, and military missions — until defense officials said it was safe to resume use of the airspace.
Incoming flights were diverted, with planes landing in Amsterdam Schiphol, Rotterdam, Brussels, and Weeze in Germany. Some outgoing flights stayed at the gate. The aircraft was one of the first to land after Eindhoven Airport resumed operations, local aviation reports said, citing Transavia.
Photos from inside Eindhoven Airport showed passengers at service desks huddling below boards flashing with disruption alerts, as airlines scrambled to reroute crews and aircraft. There were no reported injuries or damage, and operations were resuming to normal following the late-night reopening, authorities said.
Aviation safety research has cautioned that even small consumer drones can inflict much more serious damage than birds if they are sucked into an engine or a cockpit windshield, due to the hard components and lithium batteries they contain, as reported by Time magazine during the 2018 shutdown of London Gatwick Airport.
The Eindhoven incident is the most recent case in a surge of suspected hostile or unexplained drone flights over European infrastructure. Belgium’s Brussels and Liege airports closed for several hours earlier this month after drones were spotted multiple times near runways and a nearby military base, leading to diversions and delays.
In September, it was a four-hour closure at Copenhagen Airport and a shorter shutdown at Oslo Airport in what Danish authorities reportedly referred to as a possible hybrid attack, then, subsequently, temporary national restrictions on civilian drone flights according to legal analysis by Wotton Kearney and subsequent European briefings.
Germany-based Fraport says that drone incursions forced Frankfurt Airport to limit air traffic on 10 individual days during 2023, including two complete stoppages of as long as 85 minutes, FlightGlobal reported.
Munich and several other hubs have faced similar shutdowns, including one recent drone scare at Munich Airport that left nearly 3,000 passengers stranded, and industrywide reviews of airport security checks show that more than a dozen European airports were thrown into chaos by such incidents in just a single month.
The 2018 Gatwick crisis, which shut down Britain’s second-busiest airport for about 36 hours and disrupted more than 100,000 travelers, was a turning point. It spurred new regulations, registration rules, and counter-drone investments, but later reporting by The Guardian revealed how scant the hard evidence investigators ultimately found.
Regulators and airlines have since sought to balance that skepticism. A recent Reuters explainer on airport defenses noted that, with many (vastly annoying) drone scares turning out to be harmless objects, shutdowns remain the best course of action when it’s not possible to quickly verify threats.
European leaders now view the pattern of incursions as part of a broader security threat. In October, von der Leyen, the European Commission president, laid out a continent-wide “European Drone Defence Initiative” to stitch together sensors, jammers, and interception systems by 2027, building on previous calls by her for a protective “drone wall.
Von der Leyen has previously called recent airspace incursions — such as Russian drones and military jets briefly penetrating the skies of Poland and Estonia — elements of “hybrid warfare,” while officials in Denmark and Belgium say some incidents at airports would appear to be deliberate efforts to destabilize vital infrastructure.
In the Netherlands, authorities are still trying to figure out who was behind the drones that flew near Eindhoven Airport and Volkel and whether they were connected with a spate of other flights over NATO territory in recent weeks. Under safety rules tightened after earlier incidents, it is likely that future sightings of a drone near planes just outside the airport will also prompt rapid shutdowns while the threat is evaluated.
