Drones were first sighted near Göteborg Landvetter Airport before 18:00 local time (17:00 UTC) on Thursday, 6 November 2025, according to Björn Stavås of the Swedish Civil Aviation Administration, who said it was not yet clear whether one drone or multiple drones had been observed. Swedavia, which operates Landvetter and nine other Swedish airports, closed the airspace immediately. Swedavia Chief Operations Officer Susanne Norman confirmed the closure to AFP: "The airspace over Landvetter is closed at the moment because of an indication of a suspected drone." The airport reopened and returned to normal operations at 21:30 local time (20:30 UTC), a shutdown of roughly three and a half hours.
Associative image. Consumer/commercial quadcopter.
The closure cancelled 24 flights and delayed dozens more
Flight-tracking data cited by AeroTime showed 10 departures from Gothenburg cancelled and 9 delayed, while 5 arrivals were cancelled and 10 delayed; Kyiv Post put the total at 24 cancelled flights, with the last departure before the shutdown a Wizz Air service to Gdańsk. The Swedish Armed Forces and police were notified. Police spokesman Johan Håkansson said officers were on site working to establish what had happened.
Göteborg Landvetter is Sweden's second-largest airport by traffic.
Part of a wave of European airport disruptions
The Landvetter closure followed a string of drone-related shutdowns at airports across Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Denmark, and Germany in the weeks after 19 drones entered Polish airspace via Belarus on 10 September 2025, of which four were shot down. Drones were also reported hovering over Belgium's Kleine Brogel Air Base, long believed to host US nuclear weapons, in the same period. Moscow has denied involvement in the wave of incidents; NATO officials have characterised the pattern as consistent with Russian hybrid warfare against Europe, though no attribution has been confirmed for the Landvetter sighting specifically.
Wind conditions over Härryda
At 17:00 UTC on 6 November, the 3,000 m layer over Landvetter showed wind pushing east-northeast at 22.6 km/h.
This reconstruction draws on reporting by AeroTime and Kyiv Post, and on AirVeto's wind-model data for the 17:00-20:30 UTC window on 6 November 2025. How the model is built and where it is reliable is on the methodology page. A full archive of drone and airspace incidents across the EU's eastern border is at the incident archive.