A Suspected Drone That Shut Vilnius Airport and Scrambled a NATO Jet Was a Flock of Birds

Vilnius Airport closed for about 38 minutes on Sunday, September 13, 2026, after radar picked up what Lithuanian authorities feared was a drone, and NATO sent a fighter jet to look. The pilot found a flock of birds.

Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Centre declared a yellow air alert at 12:59 p.m. local time and lifted it at 1:37 p.m., once the jet had made a visual identification, Reuters reported. The Vilnius marathon, running in the capital at the time, went ahead without interruption.

What happened

The jet came from Šiauliai Air Base in northern Lithuania, home to NATO’s Baltic air policing detachment. Italy has held that rotation since July 31, with four Eurofighter Typhoons and about 200 personnel, according to LRT.

Flights paid for the check. Two inbound aircraft diverted to Kaunas, Lithuania’s second city, and a flight from Warsaw turned back, Simple Flying reported. Another flight headed for Gdańsk, then returned to Vilnius International Airport once it reopened.

Why radar can mistake birds for a drone

“On initial radar readings, marks left by birds and drones can be similar,” the crisis centre said in its statement. Its head, Vilmantas Vitkauskas, said in a radio interview quoted by Aviation A2Z that a large concentration of birds moving in the same direction can at first resemble a drone.

The physics backs him up. Birds are similar in size to small drones and fly at similar heights and speeds, a 2018 study in Scientific Reports noted, which is why a detection radar has to be built specifically to tell the two apart.

Researchers separate them using micro-Doppler, the small frequency shifts created by moving parts. On a drone those come from spinning propeller blades, on a bird from flapping wings, and the study found the two signatures distinct.

Birds usually worry aviation for the damage they do to engines, the subject of our explainer on whether airplanes avoid birds. On Sunday the problem was identification.

The first detection came from the Lithuanian Armed Forces’ air defense radars, and the alert covered Vilnius city and the Vilnius, Trakai and Elektrėnai districts, Respublika reported, citing the crisis centre.

Why Vilnius closes first and checks second

Lithuania has reason to act fast. Vitkauskas said at least 22 smuggling drones had been recorded in Lithuanian airspace in September alone, and military drones straying into Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have raised fears that the war in Ukraine is spilling over, Reuters noted.

NATO fighters shot down a drone over Latvia in August. Vilnius itself spent much of last autumn closing for smuggling balloons launched from Belarus.

In October 2025 alone the airport shut at least six times, Flightradar24 counted. One overnight closure on October 21 to 22 lasted more than eight hours and hit about 30 flights and more than 4,000 travelers.

Lithuania answered those balloons by closing its Belarus border crossings and authorizing the military to shoot them down. Sunday’s alert shows the trade-off it has settled on: a short closure whenever radar sees something it cannot yet identify, even when the answer turns out to be birds.