Drone sightings halt air traffic near Dutch city of Eindhoven

On the evening of Saturday, 22 November 2025, all air traffic at Eindhoven Airport in the southern Netherlands was suspended after multiple drones were sighted in the vicinity. Eindhoven is a dual-use facility serving both civilian passenger flights and the Royal Netherlands Air Force, so the closure affected military as well as commercial operations. According to NOS, the disruption began in the evening and traffic resumed roughly two hours later, at around 11 p.m. No flights departed or landed while the airspace was closed.

Several inbound flights were diverted to other airports while Eindhoven was shut, with reported destinations including Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Brussels and Weeze in Germany; the precise number of diverted flights varied across early reporting. Dutch Defence Minister Ruben Brekelmans said that "Defence has taken measures," adding that "out of security considerations no further information can be shared." Authorities did not disclose the number of drones involved, and the operator and origin were not identified.

The Eindhoven closure followed a separate incident the previous night. On Friday, 21 November, drones were reported over Volkel Air Base, a sensitive air force installation roughly 40 kilometres northeast of Eindhoven. Dutch military personnel fired ground-based weapons at the unidentified drones during that episode; no wreckage was reported recovered. The two events occurred against a backdrop of repeated unexplained drone incursions near airports and military sites across Europe in late 2025.

The closely timed sightings over Eindhoven Airport and Volkel Air Base, together with the deployment of military countermeasures, indicate Dutch authorities treated the drones as a deliberate security concern rather than routine nuisance flights. However, no operator or state has been identified, and officials disclosed little detail. The incidents fit a broader pattern of airspace incursions across Europe that some EU figures have characterised as hybrid warfare, but any attribution to a specific actor remains unproven on the available reporting and should be treated as an open line of inquiry.