Drone sightings disrupt flights at Copenhagen, Oslo airports

Audio By Carbonatix

By Stine Jacobsen and Surbhi Misra

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) -Copenhagen Airport, the busiest in the Nordic region, said it reopened early on Tuesday after drone sightings halted all take-offs and landings for nearly four hours, with Norway’s Oslo Airport also re-opened after it had shut its airspace over a drone.

“The police have launched an intensive investigation to determine what kind of drones these are,” Copenhagen Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jakob Hansen told reporters. “The drones have disappeared and we have not taken any of them,” he added.

Hansen said authorities in Denmark and Norway would cooperate to determine whether there was a link between the two incidents.

The airspace at Oslo airport in Norway was reopened by 3:22 a.m. (0122 GMT), a spokesperson for Norwegian airport operator Avinor said in a statement.

It had been shut since midnight (2200 GMT) due to a drone observation, with all flights diverted to the nearest airport.

Danish police said earlier on Monday that two or three large drones had been seen flying near Copenhagen’s airport, closing it to all traffic.

The airport halted operations at 8:26 p.m. (1826 GMT) on Monday, according to flight tracking service FlightRadar. Around 50 flights were diverted to alternate airports, FlightRadar said on X.

After it reopened, Copenhagen Airport said on X that delays and some cancelled departures would persist and urged passengers to check with their airlines.

The airport shutdowns came after a string of disruptions at European airports in recent days.

A cyberattack last Friday knocked out check-in and boarding systems supplied by Collins Aerospace, a unit of RTX, affecting operations at London’s Heathrow and the Berlin and Brussels airports. Over the weekend and into Monday, the fallout continued to snarl travel across the region.

In 2018, drone sightings over the runway at Gatwick near London stranded tens of thousands of passengers and disrupted hundreds of flights at the height of the holiday season.

(Reporting by Stine Jacobsen, Louise Rasmussen and Surbhi Misra; Additional reporting by Harshita Meenaktshi in Bengaluru and Nora Buli in Oslo; Editing by Jamie Freed and Stephen Coates)