Brussels – For the third time in 72 hours, drone activity paralysed Belgium’s largest airport on Thursday evening. At 19:00 CET, air-traffic controller Skeyes detected an unidentified unmanned aerial vehicle near the final-approach path to runway 25R. Following standard safety protocol, Brussels Airport halted all movements for 30 minutes, diverting one Amsterdam-bound flight and holding seven others in airborne stacks.
Operations resumed at 21:53 after no further activity was observed, airport spokesperson Nathalie Pierard said. Although the window of disruption was short, it triggered a wave of missed connections for North-Atlantic business travellers and forced several cargo operators to reschedule overnight freighter slots—critical hours for Belgium’s pharmaceutical and e-commerce exporters.
![Evening drone sighting forces 30-minute shutdown at Brussels Airport]()
Skeyes later confirmed that the sighting had not yet been “formally verified” by radar, highlighting the difficulty of detecting small hobby-class drones with conventional surveillance equipment. The incident occurred just hours after the NSC announced the new NASC, underlining the urgency of a permanent solution.
Travel managers are advised to monitor Brussels Airport’s Twitter feed and opt in to the airport’s disruption-alert SMS service. Airlines are temporarily waiving change fees for same-day rebooking on Belgium-bound itineraries.
Operations resumed at 21:53 after no further activity was observed, airport spokesperson Nathalie Pierard said. Although the window of disruption was short, it triggered a wave of missed connections for North-Atlantic business travellers and forced several cargo operators to reschedule overnight freighter slots—critical hours for Belgium’s pharmaceutical and e-commerce exporters.
Skeyes later confirmed that the sighting had not yet been “formally verified” by radar, highlighting the difficulty of detecting small hobby-class drones with conventional surveillance equipment. The incident occurred just hours after the NSC announced the new NASC, underlining the urgency of a permanent solution.
Travel managers are advised to monitor Brussels Airport’s Twitter feed and opt in to the airport’s disruption-alert SMS service. Airlines are temporarily waiving change fees for same-day rebooking on Belgium-bound itineraries.
