NEWS · LUXEMBOURG

Unidentified drones shut Luxembourg Airport overnight; Berlin halts runways days later

Flights at Luxembourg’s Findel airport stopped for hours after drones were seen over the field. In Berlin, controllers have logged 28 drones at BER this year.

September 19, 2026 · 2 min read · By The Phenomenon Files

On the evening of September 18, unauthorized drones were “visually observed” near and then over Luxembourg Airport at Findel, according to the Luxembourg government. Flights were halted as a “precautionary safety measure” and resumed at about 1:20 a.m. on September 19, after two inspections found no immediate risk.

The trade site DRONELIFE reports that 19 inbound flights were diverted. The Kyiv Independent reported that one flight from London landed in Liège instead. One passenger told the Luxembourg Times that their pilot announced drones were still over the airport.

The government’s response

Prime Minister Luc Frieden met Defence and Mobility Minister Yuriko Backes, Interior Minister Léon Gloden and the agencies involved, and the government activated its interministerial drone assessment group. Extra detection equipment, some of it from foreign partners, was in place by September 20.

Later drone reports turned out to be mostly the navigation lights of ordinary aircraft. The government says the information so far does “not support any final conclusions.” No operator — and no country — has been named.

Berlin: 28 drones in six months

On September 23, a drone was spotted near the northern runway at Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER) at about 8 p.m., the German news agency dpa reported. Germany’s air navigation service, DFS, closed the northern runway and then the southern one, and lifted the restrictions about an hour later.

According to dpa, air traffic controllers logged 28 drones at BER in the first half of 2026, compared with 8 in all of 2025, and operations were suspended seven times in that period. Many such reports involve real drones; others, as Luxembourg found, turn out to be aircraft lights. Either way, an unidentified object over a runway shuts it down until someone can say what it was.