Copenhagen airport closure due to reported drone activity
- Thread starter Kyle Ferriter
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Kyle Ferriter
Senior Member.
I think it's all public broadcasts and if you have a radio receiver close enough to the tower you can hear it. liveatc.net relies on radio receivers relaying the broadcasts to them, similar to how ADSB aggregators work. And liveatc just happens to have no relays at Copenhagen airport. They do have coverage at Oslo airport though, for example.
https://www.liveatc.net/search/?icao=ENGM
And they have a page for Copenhagen that doesn't show up in their search but you can manually enter the URL to, suggesting they may have previously had coverage there, but don't right now.
https://www.liveatc.net/hlisten.php?mount=ekch_twr
It's nuts they all just stood there and looked up.
Regarding the plane, I got this comment on my video:
"This is a typical pattern for flight instruction. Its called "touch and go". Both night and day in between commercial flights they allow student pilots to practice."
If you look what it's doing all other days, it's actually stuff like this all the time, but never in a big airport like CPH, and over planes taxiing - it doesn't feel right!
I don't see how a touch-and-go landing could have been approved on that runway (12 on approach from NW, 30 on approach from SE). On the first pass, lined up with Runway 12, at 18:17, there was an ITA plane on taxiway B, right on the edge of the runway, and a Finnair plane on taxiway A that had only just cleared it.
If this track is accurate then it passed virtually over the top of stationary ITA flight 1977 at just 350 feet, which surely counts as a near miss?
18:17:00
18:17:10
On the second pass, from the SE, it passed over two planes at a height of 400ft: the ITA one again, and easyJet 1291 which was just behind it.
18:19:30
Surely this sort of thing isn't normally approved at a major international airport? On that last pass the easyJet plane was literally on the runway if the ADSB Exchange track is accurate!
I live close to a general aviation airport. I often watch the student pilots doing touch-and-go landings (there's even a cafe perfectly sited for this). But they don't do it with commercial flights crossing the runway!
Kyle Ferriter
Senior Member.
Interesting it appears the UK actually does make it illegal. liveatc shows a specific banner for Heathrow saying they're not allowed to host that feed.
I hate to say it, but the Danish police are often terrible amateurs!
I made this video yesterday, actually before I saw this thread, to see if people had some answers, but it's now really coming out to a broad audience, so metabunk is better I guess
Source: https://youtu.be/H-h-vOGn_W4
There are lots of reports about the drones but not a single video that I have seen that matches what supposedly was going on for several hours.
https://news.sky.com/story/copenhagen-drone-incursion-fits-russian-pattern-danish-pm-says-13436745
www. reddit. com/r/UFOs/comments/1no2uxb/comment/nfpks2n/ (broken link as the auto embedding was messing up the formatting)
And at Oslo, no evidence there was ever a drone, but two people were arrested for flying a (presumably hobby) drone over a fort, which all gets added to the mythos...
https://news.sky.com/story/copenhagen-drone-incursion-fits-russian-pattern-danish-pm-says-13436745
External Quote:
www. reddit. com/r/UFOs/comments/1no2uxb/comment/nfpks2n/ (broken link as the auto embedding was messing up the formatting)
That sounds quite remarkable but nobody apparently managed to film them?External Quote:
And at Oslo, no evidence there was ever a drone, but two people were arrested for flying a (presumably hobby) drone over a fort, which all gets added to the mythos...
Mendel
Senior Member.
I've quoted a professional pilot above who said that CAT do this regularly for sight-seeing, and it is obviously always coordinated with the airport and therefore safe. This was not a unique event, and there's nothing on FR24 that indicates that it was in any way dangerous.
No, it doesn't count as a near miss. There's no danger of collision. You wouldn't say it was a near miss if they flew at 350 feet over a house, either.
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It's the same every time and everywhere.
I don't doubt there could be some drones, but it's never the ones they film.
UAV Hive
Active Member
Hang on, Chris is not considered a drone expert within the drone industry, seeing this comment almost made me fall off my chair!
He's in the UAP scene, he gets the odd snippet of useful information but it's almost always framed in a UAP context without analysis against the range of public sources that occurs on this group for example.
BTW, this my first post here so hello, my name is Ian, I post on X as UAVHIVE and I've assisted journalists in claimed drone incidents, working with The Guardian for Gatwick 2018 (which spoiler-alert likely wasn't a drone, but an airport/police balls-up) and I liaised with a BBC reporter on Lakenheath, where I believe due to the FOIA pressure a claimed drone near miss with an NPAS helicopter was properly investigated revealing it was actually a USAF F-15 jet.
I am here as events of this week smack of a balls-up, I can see clear parallels with Gatwick, including police not being equipped (in the photos I've seen) with spotting and thermal scopes, no evidence of a device being used to manage the incident with ATAK (Android Team Awareness Kit) either.
I write the odd piece for sUAS News and assist with Freedom of Information reveals, so I contacted the Copenhagen police press office today to push for evidence I'd expect at an airport and to also ask if they'd looked at public sources of information such as this very thread. Needlessly to say it was a standard response, but hopefully they're now aware the drone community is watching and won't be blagged.
There are a lot of myths with drones, they don't have high powered navigation lights, and few drones, except for high end ones even have strobes, so at night a drone is almost invisible by 120m and you hear a drone before you see it in reality.
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It also flew the next day and today, so of cause there isn't a problem. I still find it strange though.
I had a look at the flight history of OY-CDT on FR24 - I have a silver subscription so I can see three months of flights. There don't seem to be any similar flights in the past three months over CPH airport. In fact none of them ventured over the airport at all, at any altitude. Most of them are short loops from Roskilde, sometimes with some touch-and-go circuits; the tracking is spotty on many of those so it's hard to tell exactly what it's doing, and it looks as though some of the circuits get broken up into separate flights on the site.
Of the longer flights, they mostly seem to be circuits of the island of Zealand, often with loops over certain areas and sometimes combined with some touch-and-go at the end. This is a typical example. There are also a small number that pass over the city of Copenhagen itself, but not over the airport.
Incidentally, is it known that this plane is still run by Copenhagen AirTaxi? I found conflicting information online, suggesting it had been sold. It's not listed in the CAT fleet on FR24 and upthread it was suggested it was now owned by a flying school.
None of the other CAT planes seem to have done anything similar at Copenhagen in the past three months either. I haven't checked every flight but most of them just seem to be point-to-point "taxi" flights. The two P68s, OY-CDC and OY-SUR, do some meandering pleasure/training flights similar to the OY-CDT track above.
So while I don't want to second-guess the professional you quoted, it clearly isn't something that is done all that frequently done by CAT. Their only flight in at least the past three months that did a low pass over the runway just happened to be less than 10 minutes before the airport was shut by drone reports? Coincidences happen, but really?
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Godfred Juhl
Member
It is still the same company that has the plane and they operate both taxi and pilot training, this was a training flight
Incidentally the poster on PPRuNe you quote later corrected himself, clarifying that it wasn't ATC (i.e. Naviair) that spotted the drones, but they were informed by other airport staff (the "us" referred to above).
https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/668360-cph-closed-due-drone-sightings.html#post11958180External Quote:
UAV Hive
Active Member
The problem with "drone" sightings, is the moment one is reported, if people are utilised to look at the sky at night with eyes. once told to report a drone they'll report every light in the sky, Starlink, planets, stars, planes and even cranes!
The police if they've really messed up, arguable utilise this to their benefit, arguing the public sightings prove they've not made a mistake.
I can't yet find evidence to prove the airport has C-UAS (counter drone) but it has been rumoured it has a French C-UAS, so I'd guess at something like Thales EagleShield. If someone knows of where I can see recent photographs of the airport I can likely identify any counter drone systems.
Really the airport should have had a EO/IR (Electro-Optical/Infra-Red) head to record evidence of any drones, that's pretty much standard these days, albeit the quality of video heads varies with some airports buying kit that's poor at night to save cost.
Kyle Ferriter
Senior Member.
I looked through the most recent 100 flights for this particular plane and some do fly over downtown Copenhagen, but none of them go over or even very near the Kastrup airport. Maybe others from this flight school do. Is it possible ATC did approve this flight but someone else on the ground found it surprising and called it in? From earlier descriptions it sounded like ATC was not the one who flagged there being drones, it was other airport staff. It is odd that we've seen no details at all so far about what ATC saw happening, as everything we've seen described from police or alleged eyewitnesses at the airport (like large round craft flashing blue on the runway) should have been seen in detail by ATC and have been captured on radar and cameras.
I also just noticed the Roskilde (EKRK) airport has a runway 11/29, which is just 1 (10º) off from Copenhagen (EKCH) runways 12/30. RKE also has its own ATC. So I was very weakly hypothetically considering the possibility that the pilot did not switch to the EKCH ATC frequency, and was actually on the radio with EKRK ATC who approved passes on runways 11/29, but the pilot actually did them at Copenhagen runways 12/30. This does sound crazy though, and like it would have been reported on if it happened. So I am not proposing it as being very likely.
source: https://skyvector.com/?ll=55.58550627671400,12.13124008071900&chart=301&zoom=5
In the United States, in is very common for aircraft to be routed directly over the top of an airport. In fact for many busy airports, this is the absolute safest place to route an aircraft that is transiting the airspace of a controlled airport. The typical exchange between air traffic control and an aircraft is that the pilot requests permission to transit the airspace of an airport, then the controller will approve or disapprove followed by a course and altitude. This can be negotiated, but the course will typically be nearly perpendicular to active runways and the altitude will be above the landing pattern altitude. It turns out that the aircraft landing and taking off at an airport rarely (if ever) use this space so it is safe for transiting aircraft.
Flying VFR (visual flight rules), pilots often use uncontrolled airports/landing strips as way points since they are easy to spot. So long as you look out for other pilots doing the same thing, flying directly over the airport above pattern altitude is very safe, no permissions needed. IIRC, even controlled airports generally have an altitude cap at which they don't care about aircraft above that height. Very busy commercial airports generally have higher caps.
I recall during one of my cross country flights while training to be a pilot, I flew directly over the top of SFO, (San Francisco International Airport). For this busy of an airspace, I was coordinating with ATC of course. This was quite some time ago, so if I were to do it again, I'd definitely do my homework to verify current procedures. I commonly overflew ONT (Ontario International Airport) in Southern California. It is a much less busy airport than SFO, yet it still has a multitude of commercial aircraft flying in and out. The tower usually had me line up with a rarely used N/S runway as a convenient and very visible path. Altitudes allowed were generally pretty low if there was only commercial traffic. The commercial traffic tends to have straight in and straight out routes, meaning they generally don't fly a pattern of downwind/crosswind/final, leaving the area across the runway(s) in use completely empty, even at a significant distance perpendicular to the runway.
Godfred Juhl
Member
That's how I perceive the situation.External Quote:
I have contacted several Danish journalists, asked them to stop their clocks to 20:20 (local) and forget about drones and investigate OY-CDT as a possible security breach, with expert statements, how often it happens, etc. That way they could perhaps avoid narrative control from their editors. One of journos, who had been in contact with the company, gave me this information "In complete confidence", I could not keep it, in my opinion this information does not harm the country's security, at most the narrative. So if I don't post anymore, the intelligence services have come for meExternal Quote:
gargamel
Senior Member
Nabo här. Yes, in Sweden as well. I wouldn't necessarily call them amateurs, but they are not trained observers when it comes to these things. 99% of what they do, and indeed excel at barring the occasional mess-up is so different from this.
This goes back way before "drones" became a thing, back to the regular UFO days when you had police patrols trying to chase down Venus for hours etc.
So basically I'd cut them some slack (but recommend to the relevant authorities that some basic training concerning celestial objects, aircraft and what they look like, how viewing conditions affect that etc should be implemented, perhaps).
A larger concern of mine is media and how it treats these things. Given that police most likely has no idea of what they are looking at, take that into consideration and don't relay their statements as if they do. Same with everyday folks.
And I just saw an alleged "drone expert" being interviewed by SVT regarding the earliest plane that was filmed and that has already conclusively been shown to have been the air taxi flight, and he said "this is a big craft, not something you just pick off the shelf at your local toystore"
OK, fair enough, and yes, very true. But the framing...
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Do you have any luck getting a reply from a Danish journalist?? I never do.That's how I perceive the situation.External Quote:
I have contacted several Danish journalists, asked them to stop their clocks to 20:20 (local) and forget about drones and investigate OY-CDT as a possible security breach, with expert statements, how often it happens, etc. That way they could perhaps avoid narrative control from their editors. One of journos, who had been in contact with the company, gave me this information "In complete confidence", I could not keep it, in my opinion this information does not harm the country's security, at most the narrative. So if I don't post anymore, the intelligence services have come for meExternal Quote:
Godfred Juhl
Member
If the topic is useful to them and the request is well-substantiated, someone will occasionally bite the hook, but it is rare, a bit like competitions, the more you participate in, the bigger the chance. This journo initially refused to investigate it, and that is a good start, I thanked him for the answer and whined a little more and half an hour later I got this information, of course I was surprised.
I wonder if this part is Chinese whispers. There's a quote in the media that's very similar:
https://news.sky.com/story/flights-suspended-at-copenhagen-airport-after-drone-sightings-13436457External Quote:
[Likely the inbound flight she is referring to was BA820 from Heathrow which was diverted to Malmö. It was due to land at 8.55pm local time and the return leg, BA821, was scheduled to leave at 9.45pm.]
But it seems pretty clear she was referring to police or other emergency vehicles, not drones. As pictured here: https://presse-fotos.dk/kaempe-aktion-lukker-koebenhavns-lufthavn-alle-fly-paa-jorden/
Caption says "There are blue flashes in and around most of the airport – see more pictures below".
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gargamel
Senior Member
And, pardon for being a tad spammy but: I have come to realize that the vast majority of people are just awful at spatial awareness and thinking a bit "outside the box". People tend to go for the closest solution to everything, which doesn't involve having to think about distances and angles and sound propagation and so on and ao forth.
So a lot of the times a super loud and rather hefty airliner at 40k feet can become a mysteriously silent smallish UFO or "drone" at 100 feet, in the dark, and they go for the 2nd option. Because they don't think much further than what is normally required in everyday life.
Same with bug UFOs etc, but in reverse (small insect zipping across a screen becomes a huge craft flying at physically impossible velocities in the distance). It's as if people are generally unaware of stuff that flies or is otherwise in the skies and can't comprehend what they'd look like in various situations. Like adding 1 and 1.
Okay, end rant.
So a lot of the times a super loud and rather hefty airliner at 40k feet can become a mysteriously silent smallish UFO or "drone" at 100 feet, in the dark, and they go for the 2nd option. Because they don't think much further than what is normally required in everyday life.
Same with bug UFOs etc, but in reverse (small insect zipping across a screen becomes a huge craft flying at physically impossible velocities in the distance). It's as if people are generally unaware of stuff that flies or is otherwise in the skies and can't comprehend what they'd look like in various situations. Like adding 1 and 1.
Okay, end rant.
UAV Hive
Active Member
Having had a look around Copenhagen Airport with Google Maps and using videos captured there too, I didn't spot any C-UAS (counter drone) systems, just normal CCTV. Given the Google photography isn't as up to date as it is with other airports that's not conclusive.
HOWEVER, the media reported DroneSentry-X was despatched to Copenhagen airport the following day, that is not a good sign, this suggests the airport was without even a fairly basic counter drone system, maybe it just had DJI AeroScope or maybe no C-UAS at all.
https://www.bt.dk/krimi/se-billedet-her-er-politiets-drone-vaaben
https://www.droneshield.com/products-on-the-move
This system is basic compared to say what the UK despatches to an airbase if there's need to improve on the systems already present.
HOWEVER, the media reported DroneSentry-X was despatched to Copenhagen airport the following day, that is not a good sign, this suggests the airport was without even a fairly basic counter drone system, maybe it just had DJI AeroScope or maybe no C-UAS at all.
https://www.bt.dk/krimi/se-billedet-her-er-politiets-drone-vaaben
https://www.droneshield.com/products-on-the-move
This system is basic compared to say what the UK despatches to an airbase if there's need to improve on the systems already present.
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Godfred Juhl
Member
Thanks for the info.
https://www.dronemag.no/dansk-droneobservasjon-kan-ha-vaert-skolefly/External Quote:
Kyle Ferriter
Senior Member.
Agree, this is why the precise time info for photos/videos and anecdotes is so important. People may be referring to or capturing imagery of a law enforcement response to a thing, not the actual thing. This happened in NJ last December. More and more police departments have been buying quadcopter drones in recent years and using them with increased frequency, and in a few cases I saw last winter, people had recorded video they thought could be "illegal drones" which in fact were police drones that the police were using to investigate the reports of illegal drones. Creating a self-sustaining feedback loop.
This is helpful info. Do you remember approximately what altitude you were allowed to fly down to when you were flying over SFO and ONT? Airport controlled airspace ceilings are usually still in the thousands (e.g. near me Boston has a 7000ft ceiling, Norwood has a 2600ft, Hanscom/Bedford has 2600ft). So at 350ft you would be low within the controlled airspace, not over the top. And 350ft is so low it'd be in the same vertical space as landing patterns (though not horizontal space, if only certain angled runways were being used for arrivals/departures, and you were flying perpendicular to those or parallel to a sufficiently differently angled runway). Maybe this kind of very low route is more common for flight schools as they are practicing approaches but not actually trying to touch down, as @Mendel said.
I feel like we have determined to some level of confidence that the second clip in this NRK video is *not* of the ADSB-tracked flight by OY-CDT near Copenhagen airport in the period of ~18:05-18:21UTC, because the lines of sight to other objects in the video do not work until 18:37UTC and later. And given the airport closed at 18:26UTC it is unlikely to be OY-CDT because it is unlikely they would have been approved for another pass over the airport while the airport was closed and there was a law enforcement response, and even if it was approved, it is unlikely that there would be no track for it in either FlightRadar24 or ADSBX.
(EDIT: strikeout, this is possible but it is also likely that no part of the NRK video shows OY-CDT. The Danish TV clip does still look like a match for it, though, as shown in Post #19)
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Godfred Juhl
Member
Maybe this document can help? I can't interpret it, I'm a layman myself, maybe there is a code for training is allowed, but the data are listed hereExternal Quote:
https://wiki.vatsim-scandinavia.org/attachments/468?open=true
Mendel
Senior Member.
The rule for controlled airspace is, if ATC allows it, it's allowed.
The Danish Public Broadcaster (DR) has reported the airspace above the regional, dual-use Danish airport Aalborg Airport (AAL/EKYT) is closed due to drone sightings.
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/drone-lukker-luftrum-over-aalborg
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/drone-lukker-luftrum-over-aalborg
I am fairly sure that both of those clips were filmed at similar times and in the same place, on taxiway A2 which is one of four short parallel "parking bays" where aircraft were waiting. (Not sure what the correct terminology is!) See the analysis in post 67 and 68.
Which effectively rules out the CAT plane. The only video which does seem likely to be that plane is the one filmed from the terminal building, shared on Danish TV. But again it might not be because the part of the flight path captured in the first part of the Norwegian clip seems quite similar to the track of OY-CDT.
Didn't see Oxlund's post beating me to it, but the incident sounds very flappy.
https://news.sky.com/story/aalborg-...lose-after-drones-spotted-police-say-13437595
https://news.sky.com/story/aalborg-...lose-after-drones-spotted-police-say-13437595
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Kyle Ferriter
Senior Member.
Ah yeah I think you are right based on how the ground and the lights/buildings in the background look.
From FR24 it looks like the first plane to be diverted was SK1221 at about 1945 UTC.
NSZ3098 and KL1289 have also been diverted.
I can't see anything obvious on flight trackers that would explain it. There were a couple of air ambulance helicopters flying about 10 minutes before the first diversion but they were over 40 miles to the south.
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It been a long time since my SFO flyover, but I'm pretty sure I was at a significant altitude, maybe 5000-7000 feet. ONT flyovers could easily have been at less than 1000 feet AGL (Above Ground Level). Mendel is absolutely right, if ATC says you can do it, you can do it. That said, I can't remember ATC ever saying I could do something stupid. The flight school I trained with had a good relationship with the local controllers. We loved ONT. We could do three touch and go's on a single pass with a Cessna and a 10,000 foot runway.
As far as airport control ceilings, they aren't no-go altitudes. It just means before going over an airport at less than the control ceiling you have ask for and receive permission. Restricted airspace is a whole different thing.
As an aside, my favorite all time landing was at ONT when the Santa Ana winds were blowing. The winds were close to 100 knots directly out of the north. We used the N/S runway (much shorter than the E/W runways). The typical landing speed of a Cessna 172 is about 80-85 knots. It is unusual to have an airspeed in excess of 100 knots at touchdown, but we had to keep the wing clean and not flair much just so our ground speed was positive at contact. I think they closed the N/S runway when they remodeled the airport, so you can't experience the elevator descent any longer.
Kyle Ferriter
Senior Member.
(translated by google)External Quote:
Source: https://nyheder.tv2.dk/live/krimi/2025-09-22-droner-forstyrrer-luftrummet-over-aalborg-lufthavn
Kyle Ferriter
Senior Member.
Alleged Aalborg drone video scraped from: https://nyheder.tv2.dk/live/krimi/2...rg?entry=0910a895-8477-48e4-ae86-fb25e66936e2
Time on post says 18:22, time on video caption says 18:04. Assumed localtime, UTC+2. Hard to know if 18:04 is the actual time the video was recorded.
Translated by google:
Time on post says 18:22, time on video caption says 18:04. Assumed localtime, UTC+2. Hard to know if 18:04 is the actual time the video was recorded.
Translated by google:
Likely enough context visible in order to geolocate.External Quote:
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Kyle Ferriter
Senior Member.
Another video. We may need a new thread for Aalborg.
Source: https://x.com/MSchieller69609/status/1970987048938131854
Source: https://x.com/MSchieller69609/status/1970987048938131854
UAV Hive
Active Member
That is not a drone as again these are high powered navigation lights and a strobe at a distance, the police have despatched helicopters so they'll likely add to false positive confirmations and it could be one of those.
I don't believe the police drones show on the ADS-B in Denmark but maybe someone can confirm that.
It's concerning the police are talking about shooting at drones as they'll probably just shoot one of their own helicopters.
I know at Gatwick the MOD/RAF demanded that weapons weren't used albeit the police lobbied for that to be partially overturned.
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