Lithuania capital airport closes again over balloons

VILNIUS: Lithuania’s Vilnius airport said on Sunday it had temporarily halted operations due to suspected balloons in its airspace, the latest in a series of flight disruptions in the Baltic nation.

European aviation has repeatedly been thrown into chaos in recent months by drone sightings and incursions, including in Copenhagen and Brussels, and the Vilnius airport has been closed at least 10 times since early October.

The Baltic country has said weather balloons flown by smugglers are transporting contraband cigarettes, and blames Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko for allowing the practice, calling it a form of “hybrid attack”.

Lithuania, in October, closed both crossing points on the Belarus border in response to balloons, but reopened them last week as the air traffic interruptions appeared to have stopped.

Lukashenko called the border closure a “crazy scam”, accusing the West of fighting a hybrid war against Belarus and Russia, ushering in a new era of barbed-wire division.

Earlier, in October, there were over 1,500 trucks in the electronic queue on the Belarusian side of the border.

According to the Lithuanian National Crisis Management Center (NCMC), several dozen weather balloons carrying illegal goods flew from Belarus into Lithuania during the night.

So far, five of them have been found, one person has been detained, and about 7,000 packs of cigarettes have been seized.

Due to that, air traffic over the Lithuanian capital was temporarily suspended.

The airport’s operations were disrupted due to the appearance of weather balloons used to smuggle cigarettes from Belarus, according to a statement by the NCMC.

According to TVP Vilnius, the disruption affected more than 4,000 passengers.

Approximately 30 flights were disrupted. Fourteen planes flying to Vilnius were redirected to other airports – ten to Kaunas, two to Riga, and one each to Palanga and Warsaw. The airport was finally reopened at 6:40 a.m. However, the effects of the incident are still being dealt with.

There may be isolated flight delays during the day due to disrupted crew and aircraft rotations,” said Vitalija Ročė, a representative of Lithuanian airports, appealing to passengers to check the status of their flights online.

A similar incident, albeit on a smaller scale, occurred at Vilnius Airport on October 3. At that time, 20 balloons carrying contraband from Belarus violated Lithuanian airspace.