Germany prepares to close skies in case of attack amid rising defence concerns

Germany, home to one of the world’s busiest airspaces, is drawing up plans to rapidly secure its skies in the event of an attack against the country or another NATO ally, DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung, the state-owned company responsible for managing the nation’s airspace stated.

“We are working currently with the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Transport on a requirement catalogue to be prepared for a defence case,” Arndt Schoenemann, chairman and CEO of DFS, told Euronews.

He outlined three levels of defence: “The first level is that there is only a threat. The second level is that we have a NATO Article 5 defence case, and the third case is the defence of the country. For these three cases we are developing different requirements and we are obliged to fulfil them according to a clear master plan,” Schoenemann added.

Following decades of underinvestment, Germany is now significantly ramping up defence spending with the aim of becoming Europe’s strongest army. This push was accelerated by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and intelligence warnings that Moscow could test NATO’s Article 5 with an attack on a member state before the end of the decade.

NATO has adopted regional defence plans to ensure rapid deployment of allied forces, while the European Union has proposed multiple initiatives to boost defence equipment production and military mobility across its 27-member bloc.

Germany’s airspace is particularly challenging to secure due to its high volume of civilian traffic, with up to 3 million flights annually at peak times—about 10,000 each day. Schoenemann warned that airlines and airports remain largely unaware that airspace may need to be temporarily re-prioritised to accommodate military operations.

“Airlines or civil airlines or airports are far away from thinking that we may enter into such a scenario where we have military activities in the country,” he said. “And this is something we need to work on, that they exactly know what’s going on in case the airspace will be closed and so on.” DFS is currently holding information sessions to explain what measures would likely be taken in such scenarios.

Another challenge is financing the technology necessary to ensure smooth operations. “We are now renewing our radars in the next 10 years and, from my perspective, a part of that could also be co-financed by military mobility because it ensures that military traffic can safely happen,” Schoenemann said, referring to EU funds aimed at boosting defence preparedness before 2030.

The European Commission has proposed a €150 billion defence loan scheme (SAFE) for member states to invest in priority areas, including air defence and military mobility. It has also suggested raising the EU’s defence and space budget for 2028–2035 to over €130 billion, with an additional €17 billion earmarked for military mobility projects—representing five-fold and ten-fold increases, respectively.

DFS is also responding to the rise of hybrid threats, particularly drone incursions. By late October, over 190 drone sightings had been reported near German airports, surpassing the 143 incidents recorded over the entirety of 2024. Munich Airport temporarily halted operations twice in early October due to drones, while Berlin Brandenburg Airport suspended flights for two hours later that month.

To tackle this, DFS has developed a platform allowing users to check where drones can safely fly across Germany and is pursuing partnerships to integrate unmanned traffic into national airspace management.

“The problem of non-cooperative drones is that they have modified software and hardware in place, and you cannot make them visible with such normal off-the-shelf systems,” Schoenemann explained. “We need to bring together network services, we need to bring together the airspace picture… and we need to bring together defence capabilities including jamming or also other ways of defending against drones.”

However, he dismissed suggestions of shooting down drones near airports, warning that such action could endanger flights in holding patterns awaiting clearance to land.

By Vafa Guliyeva