From 5 to 9 October, passengers waiting for a holiday flight at Nuremberg will share the apron with four Eurofighter Typhoon. The airport is not being closed. The fighters are not visiting for an air display. They are there because the German air force has concluded that its own airfields are the most predictable targets it owns.

The exercise is called Dispersed Operations 2026 Nuremberg, and the aircraft come from Taktisches Luftwaffengeschwader 74, the fighter wing at Neuburg an der Donau. The principle behind it has a blunter name in NATO documents: Agile Combat Employment. The Luftwaffe puts it more bluntly still. Distribute your forces in order to survive.

The problem with having a home

A modern air force lives at a handful of large, immovable bases. Everyone knows where they are. They appear on commercial satellite imagery, their runways are surveyed to the centimetre, and a country that wanted to take them out would not have to guess. Ukraine has spent three years demonstrating, in both directions, what happens to parked aircraft at a known address.

The answer NATO has settled on is not to build more bunkers. It is to stop being in one place. Agile Combat Employment means a squadron that can operate for days at a time from somewhere it does not live: a civilian airport, a stretch of motorway, a regional field with one runway and a fuel truck. If the enemy has to find you first, the missile inventory required to ground your air force stops being affordable.

What actually has to work

Flying a Eurofighter into Nuremberg is the easy part. A Typhoon needs far less runway than an Airbus A320. The hard part is everything behind it.

A fighter detachment needs fuel of the right specification and a way to get it into the aircraft on an apron designed for airliners. It needs weapons handling, or at least somewhere secure to put ordnance. It needs ground power, nitrogen, oxygen, spares, and the people who use them. It needs communications that connect back to the air defence system. And it needs force protection, because four fighters sitting on a civilian apron are worth guarding. The Luftwaffe lists protection of the deployed force explicitly as part of the Nuremberg training.

Then there is the airport itself. Nuremberg is providing runways, aprons and taxiways as they already exist, with no structural modification. Civil flights keep running. Anyone who has watched an airport handle a single diverted aircraft can imagine what four fighters flying military profiles does to a departure sequence.

Gentzsch also described civil-military cooperation as no longer a slogan but a lived reality. It is the sort of line a colonel is expected to produce at a press event. It is also, in this case, a fairly precise description of what is being rehearsed: not a combat capability so much as an administrative one. Can a German airport operator, a fighter wing and an air traffic control organisation share a runway for a working week without anyone filing a complaint?

Why Germany is doing this now

The Lubeck iteration in April used five Eurofighters from TaktLwG 73 at Laage. Nuremberg in October uses four from Neuburg. The pattern is the point: not one showcase deployment, but a repeated routine at different civilian fields with different wings, until operating away from home stops being an event.

For anyone in Nuremberg in the first week of October, it also means something simpler. Four Eurofighters, taking off and landing over a Bavarian city, between the holiday departures. Bring a camera, and allow extra time for check-in.

The April run of the same exercise at Lubeck-Blankensee, where five Eurofighters operated alongside Ryanair departures.

Sources: Bundeswehr; aeroTELEGRAPH; Park Sleep Fly; Nuremberg Airport.