OSLO (Reuters) -Lithuania suspended air traffic at Vilnius Airport due to balloons possibly flying in its airspace, and flights have been diverted to neighbouring countries, the airport’s operator said late on Saturday.<\/p>\n
European aviation has repeatedly been thrown into chaos in recent weeks by drone sightings and air incursions, including at airports in Copenhagen and Munich.<\/p>\n
“The decision was made due to a possible series of balloons heading toward Vilnius Airport,” the operator said in a statement on its Facebook page. “As a result of this incident, flights have been affected.”<\/p>\n
FLIGHTS DIVERTED TO LATVIA, POLAND<\/p>\n
At 2340 GMT, the airport said that the closure was expected to last until 4:30 a.m. on Sunday (0130 GMT), two hours later than the previous estimate.<\/p>\n
Travellers should check for updates on the airport’s website and through airline announcements, it said.<\/p>\n
Most incoming flights were redirected to neighbouring Latvia and Poland, while departures were cancelled, the operator said. One flight arriving from Copenhagen had returned to Denmark.<\/p>\n
NATO member Lithuania in August declared a 90-km (60-mile) no-fly zone parallel to the border with Belarus in response to drones entering from there, saying this would allow its armed forces to react to violations.<\/p>\n
Lithuania, a strong supporter of Ukraine, shares a 679-km (422-mile) border with Belarus, a close ally of Russia. The capital Vilnius lies roughly 30 km from the border.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis and Terje Solsvik in Oslo and Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Matthew Lewis, Rod Nickel and William Mallard)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OSLO (Reuters) -Lithuania suspended air traffic at Vilnius Airport due to balloons possibly flying in its airspace, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9639,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93],"tags":[7667,171,7668,170,2743],"class_list":{"0":"post-9638","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-vilnius","8":"tag-air-traffic","9":"tag-lithuania","10":"tag-neighbouring-countries","11":"tag-vilnius","12":"tag-vilnius-airport"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9638\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}