Drones At Danish Airports, A Plea For Responsible Official ResponseIn Europe, where this is being written, and possibly further afield, news reports are again full of drone sightings closing airports.

[cybersecurity@poliverso.org]

Drones At Danish Airports, A Plea For Responsible Official Response

In Europe, where this is being written, and possibly further afield, news reports are again full of drone sightings closing airports. The reports have come from Scandinavia, in particular Denmark, where sightings have been logged across the country. It has been immediately suggested that the Russians might somehow be involved, something they deny, which adds a dangerous geopolitical edge to the story.

To us here at Hackaday, this is familiar territory. Back in the last decade, we covered the saga of British airports closing due to drone sightings. In that case, uninformed hysteria played a large part in the unfolding events, leading to further closures. The problem was that the official accounts did not seem credible. Eventually, after a lot of investigation and freedom of information requests by the British drone community, there was a shamefaced admission that there had never been any tangible evidence of a drone being involved.

In the case of the Danish drone sightings, it seems that credible evidence has been shown for some of the events. The problem is this: just as we saw a few years ago in southern England, and in late 2024 in the US, such things create a fertile atmosphere for mass hysteria. Large numbers of people with no idea what a drone looks like are nervously scanning the skies. Before too long, they are seeing phantom drones everywhere, and then the danger is that a full-scale drone panic ensues over nothing.

Based on our on-the-ground experience of the debacle in the UK in 2018, we hope that our Danish neighbours don’t fall into the same trap as their UK counterparts by escalating matters to a crescendo based on sketchy evidence. We trust that their response will be sober, proportionate, and based on evidence for all to see.

Our concern back in 2018 was for drone enthusiasts who might lose the right to fly, while now it’s more one for all of our collective safety.

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hackaday.com/2025/09/27/drones…