I fly for a living. When an airport closes because something small and low is buzzing the approach path, that small thing instantly becomes a big operational problem. Europe spent 2022–2024 learning this the hard way: low, slow, low‑signature aerial targets are multiplying and detection remains uneven. Airports and cockpit crews do not get a second chance to react when an unidentified aerial object shows up on final approach.

Past precedent matters. Gatwick’s 2018 shutdown showed the real cost of even short runway suspensions: mass cancellations, diversions, and an overloaded backlog that takes days to unwind. From an operational standpoint, a 30‑minute closure at a major hub cascades through crew duty times, maintenance windows, and slot availability for the rest of the day. Every airport in the Nordic region is one diverted flight away from log‑jamming the network.

We are not operating in a vacuum. Since 2022 a series of low‑signature incursions and radar contacts in Eastern Europe — where drone activity and aircraft airspace breaches have been repeatedly recorded — have stressed European air policing and civil aviation alike. Romania in 2024 saw multiple small aerial targets tracked over the Black Sea and Danube delta that prompted fighter scrambles and local public alerts. That pattern erodes the comfortable assumption that critical airspace is immune to incidental or deliberate penetration.

More recently military aircraft strays and brief incursions have shown how easily legacy surveillance and response chains can be overloaded. In February 2025 Polish authorities recorded a brief penetration by a Russian Su‑24 over Gdańsk Bay. The message for civil operators is blunt: state actors and kinetic operations are crowding the radar picture and increasing the noise floor for detection systems that already struggle with small UAS signatures.

On the technical and governance side, Europe’s drone management and counter‑UAS discussions have been underway but unevenly implemented. EUROCONTROL, the EU’s U‑space support network and allied C‑UAS workshops have highlighted detection gaps, legal constraints on mitigation measures around airports, and the need for shared operational procedures between ANSPs, airport operators, police and the military. Those conversations are the right ones but they are not yet a complete defence.

What this means for Denmark and Norway right now is straightforward and uncomfortable: they sit on busy domestic and international routes, they host joint civil‑military airfields, and both have strategic infrastructure that could be a target for probing operations. A localized detection failure or an uncoordinated decision about whether to divert, circle, close, or continue operations can quickly become a public safety and political crisis. Pilots and dispatchers need clear, practiced SOPs that map to decisions traffic managers will actually take in real time.

Operational recommendations for airports and operators

1) Standardize immediate response SOPs and drill them. NOTAM criteria, diversion fields and crew relief planning must be pre‑briefed, with a bias toward preserving system resilience over ad hoc decisions. Simulate multi‑airport disruption in exercises. (Operational realism: your operations desk and your duty pilots must have rehearsal memory for a 90‑minute closure.)

2) Harden detection and data sharing. Invest in low‑altitude radar, passive RF detectors and persistent optical/IR monitoring on the approach and departure corridors. More important than any single sensor is a shared data feed into the ANSP and the airport operations centre so decisions are based on common situational awareness.

3) Clarify legal rules and chains for mitigation. Airports are not police or military. Who can order kinetic action, under what conditions, and how will collateral risk to passengers and fuel infrastructure be weighed? Civil authorities need legally authorised C‑UAS response frameworks that include escalation thresholds and community safety safeguards.

4) Build civil‑military playbooks for dual‑use airfields. Where runways serve both fighters and airliners the risk calculus changes. Joint command posts or hotlines between airport ops, military QRA and national security authorities reduce latency in decisions to divert or suspend. Train together. Practice communications with airlines on contingency re‑routing and passenger welfare.

5) Use U‑space and geofencing proactively. Where U‑space services are mature, allow temporary hard closures and automated enforcement of no‑fly zones during incidents. This reduces ambiguity for hobbyists and commercial UAS operators and buys seconds of prediction time for ATC.

For pilots and dispatchers: pragmatic cockpit guidance

  • Treat any unverified radar or visual UAS contact that is close to final or the missed approach corridor as a go‑around event and fly published missed approach procedures strictly. Do not attempt to visually identify near the runway at low altitude.
  • Expect that airports will prefer to suspend operations rather than risk a runway incursion. File diversion plans that include multiple alternates and anticipate longer passenger recovery times.
  • Keep crewing and duty‑time buffers in mind during peak seasons. If your airline has a remote operations centre, insist that it maintain a standing diversion playbook tied to actual slot reallocation plans.

Policy and industry next steps

Airspace safety is now entangled with national security. That forces difficult choices about where civil authorities cede control to defence agencies and when airports are permitted to authorise kinetic countermeasures. Those choices must be informed by risk assessments that include passenger safety, environmental consequences and the potential for misattribution. Governments should accelerate interoperable sensor networks across borders and commit to common SOPs so that an incursion in Copenhagen does not arrive in Oslo as a surprise to controllers and crews.

Conclusion

A Danish or Norwegian airport closure from a drone is not an improbable headline. The ingredients are visible in Europe already: rising low‑altitude activity, intermittent airspace violations near NATO borders, and an uneven patchwork of detection and mitigation capability. The fix is not a single technology. It is a combination of better detection, shared data, rehearsed operational playbooks, clear legal authorities for mitigation, and practical pilot and dispatcher preparations. Until those pieces are everywhere, every towered airport is a potential node in the next disruption wave. As pilots we plan for system failure. This is one more contingency we should be treating the same way.