Air traffic across Europe faces disruption for 10 days from Monday, June 12th, as Nato holds its largest ever air drill over Germany and central Europe. The Air Defender 23 exercise will involve 10,000 participants and 250 aircraft from 25 members of the defence alliance.
“We are showing that Nato territory is our red line, that we are prepared to defend every centimetre of this territory,” said German air force lieutenant general Ingo Gerhartz.
The exercises will simulate a response to an attack on a Nato member and will be “defensive” in nature, he added, designed to “optimise and enhance co-operation...to show the strength of the alliance”. Intended as a signal to Russia, German officials said the alliance also has China in mind given its increasing tensions with Taiwan.
The major focus will be above the southern state of Bavaria and neighbouring Czech Republic, German officials said, well away from the Russian Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad to the north. However some exercises are planned in the Baltic coastal states of Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern – as well as the Netherlands.
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US general Michael Loh, director of the Air National Guard, said to expect 100 US aircraft and 2,000 personnel in the skies over the central European region.
He said Nato duties were at an “inflection point” given the changed strategic landscape since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “This exercise focuses on supplementing the permanent United States presence in Europe,” he said, providing training “on a larger scale than what was usually accomplished on the continent”.
US ambassador to Germany Amy Gutmann said the 10-day exercises would “demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt the agility and the swiftness of our allied force in Nato as a first responder”.
“I would be pretty surprised if any world leader was not taking note of what this shows in terms of the spirit of this alliance, which means the strength of this alliance,” she said. “And that includes Mr Putin.”
While there were no plans to make Air Defender 23 a recurring exercise, the ambassador said the US had “no desire for this to be the last”.
German organisers insist the exercises have been planned to have only a minor impact on civilian air traffic, “in the range of minutes at most”. However Germany’s air traffic controller union has predicted “a massive impact on the flow of civil aviation”.
According to plans released, German air space will be closed in three staggered stages and areas. Daily between 11am and 1pm in a northern cluster around Baltic coastal areas, in a southern cluster (from Luxembourg to Bavaria) between 2-4pm and, for two hours from 5pm over the North Sea and Danish/Dutch airspace. No exercise flights are scheduled during next weekend, a German military spokesman said.
While exercise participants will use existing military air routes, commercial airlines will have to fly around these three main clusters until June 23rd.
Air traffic controllers expect the southern cluster to be most problematic as the summer holiday season gets under way. Flights from Ireland and the UK usually fly through here on the way to southern Europe.
The airspace closures may increase flight times by as little as seven minutes, according to aviation expects, but this could throw air schedules into disarray. “Approximately 800 flights will be rerouted daily as a result of the exercise and the associated measures,” predicted Eurocontrol, the European organisation for air safety.
