Luxembourg's Findel Airport has now been closed by drones twice inside a week, and nobody knows who is flying them.

The first closure, on Friday evening 18 September, diverted nineteen inbound flights and stranded more than 1,800 passengers. The second was shorter and quieter: no flight movements at all between 21:38 and 22:30, roughly fifty minutes, after which the airport resumed operations in full.

One honest caveat on that second closure. Sources differ on which evening it happened. The Luxembourg business title Paperjam dates it to Sunday evening, describing it as coming two days after the first closure; aeroTELEGRAPH dates it to Monday evening, 21 September. Both give identical times of 21:38 to 22:30. We have not been able to resolve the discrepancy, so we are flagging it rather than picking one.

What Luxair actually lost

The operational detail from the first closure is the clearest picture anyone has given of what a drone alert costs a small national carrier.

Luxair's chief executive Gilles Feith told RTL that air traffic control notified the airline of drone activity at around 22:10. Seventeen Luxair aircraft were airborne at that moment, and every one of them went somewhere else: Cologne, Brussels, Frankfurt, Liège, Paris, Basel, Strasbourg. Eleven were recalled after about an hour. Six spent the night at their diversion airports. By Saturday morning two were home, a third was en route, and the remaining three were expected back before midday.

For an airline with a fleet of that size, having six aircraft wake up in the wrong country is not a rounding error. It is a schedule rebuilt from scratch, crews out of position and duty limits to manage. A Ryanair departure got away late; easyJet cancelled.

Seen, never caught

Nobody has recovered a drone. Nobody has brought one down. The government has not published a number, a model, or a flight path.

Asked whether the aircraft were armed, Gloden said only that it was “mere speculation; we cannot confirm it at this stage”. The police tried to detect them with their own equipment after members of the public reported sightings. Luxair pilots reported visual sightings too, though Feith could not specify how many or how large.

Prime Minister Luc Frieden described “large drones” over Luxembourg in recent days, and set the tone for the government's response.

He has pointedly refused to name a culprit. Attributing the overflights to Russia or any other state would, at this stage, be “pure speculation”, he said: “It is too early to say such a thing.”

That restraint is notable, because Vilnius Airport's own statement on Monday night named Belarus outright after balloons closed Lithuanian airspace, which we covered in Vilnius Airport Shut by Balloons. Luxembourg has instead drawn parallels with similar overflights across Europe in recent months, and consulted its neighbours, its allies and NATO.

The control tower problem

The most revealing admission came from Mobility Minister Yuriko Backes, who acknowledged that detection capability and the protection of public infrastructure both need strengthening, and named the Findel control tower specifically as a concern.

Backes would not rule out that disrupting air traffic and unsettling the public is the whole point of the overflights, but would not confirm it either. On the closures themselves she was unambiguous: “The golden rule remains the same: safety first.”

The government is not saying what it will do if the drones come back. Frieden cited the need for confidentiality to preserve “effective deterrence and the best possible protection of the population”, which is a reasonable position and also an admission that the options are limited.

None of this is new, and that is the problem

Feith made the point himself. “For Luxair, this is nothing new,” he said, citing the airline's previous experience of drone disruption at Copenhagen and Munich. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency published a handbook on managing drone incidents at airports back in 2021, written after disruptions at Madrid, Frankfurt, Riga and Manchester.

Five years on, a European capital's airport can still be closed twice in a week by objects nobody can find, identify or stop. The procedures work perfectly: the airport shuts, the aircraft divert, everyone lands safely. That is the system doing exactly what it is designed to do, and it is also, from the point of view of whoever is flying the drones, a demonstration that it works.

RTL Luxembourg’s international roundup covering the Russian drone shot down over Lithuania during the same week.

Sources: Paperjam, aeroTELEGRAPH, RTL Luxembourg, aviation24.be, Euronews, the Luxembourg government, Luxair.