The drone is in the air. The pilot is on the ground.

What happened

• October 2025: about fifteen drones were reported over the military camp at Elsenborn. Sightings at Marche-en-Famenne and Kleine-Brogel followed in the weeks after.
• 4 November 2025: skeyes halted all traffic at Brussels Airport for the first time because of drones. Liège Airport closed too. More than fifty flights were cancelled and two dozen diverted.
• Since September 2025: the National Crisis Centre has logged 558 drone reports. By the government’s own admission, not all of them could be confirmed. Several viral “drone” videos turned out to show a police helicopter or a cargo plane.
• April 2026: VRT’s Pano found no evidence of hostile drones. The federal prosecutor has 26 investigations into some 40 incidents, without conclusions.
• 11 and 12 September 2026: it happened again at Brussels Airport. On the second evening the drone was not only seen but also picked up by skeyes’ detection equipment. The operator has not been identified.
• 16 September 2026: at Charleroi, skeyes detected a private drone in line with the runway, and the police stopped the pilot.

Many organisations, many pictures

Who is in charge depends on where the drone is. skeyes decides on the airspace. Defence covers military domains; at a civilian airport it “can only support the police”. The police are responsible everywhere else and investigate — the federal police has had a counter-drone team since 2021, but in November nobody called it in. Airport security, the Crisis Centre and the prosecutor each work from their own reports and their own screens.

The government has seen this. The National Security Council decided on a National Airspace Security Center that brings Defence, customs and the aviation authority together for a shared view of the airspace. And a draft law approved in June will let operators of critical sites — nuclear sites, prisons, Seveso plants — use counter-drone measures themselves, under strict conditions.

But a picture of the air is only half of it. The pilot stands on the ground: in a street covered by police cameras, next to a car that passed an ANPR camera, in an area a patrol can reach in minutes.

Real or not?

At night, a police helicopter or a cargo plane can look like a threat. As long as reports and sensor tracks are not on the same map, every sighting has to be treated as real. That is why airports close.

With one shared picture

• Every report on one map. Reports from pilots, guards and members of the public land there with time and location, next to radar and radio-frequency tracks and camera images. A sighting with a sensor track has a flight path; one without is marked as unconfirmed.
• Each organisation its own layers. skeyes, police, Defence and the airport work on the same map — without handing over their systems.
• A documented decision. The decision to stop traffic is based on a picture, not a phone call, and is documented as it happens.

From sighting to pilot

Meridian doesn’t catch anyone; police and prosecutors do. What changes is where they start.

1. 01

   Go to the launch point while the drone is still flying

   Many drones broadcast the pilot’s position — through EU Remote ID, mandatory since 2024 for most drones above 250 grams, or through DJI’s own DroneID. Where a radio-frequency sensor reads that signal, the position appears on the map and the nearest patrol is sent there.

2. 02

   Narrow the search when the drone doesn’t broadcast

   Not every drone does: light drones are exempt, and the drone found near Leipzig Airport in August carried a 5G router and SIM cards. Then the radar track points back towards a launch area, and one question does the rest: which vehicles did ANPR cameras record within three kilometres of that area during both incidents? It is answered from existing police sources, only by someone with a legal basis — and it is logged.

3. 03

   Connect the incidents

   Forty incidents in twenty-six files are forty separate puzzles. Laid over each other in time and space — dates, hours, flight paths, launch areas, weather — they show whether this is one actor or many, a pattern or panic.

4. 04

   Evidence that holds

   The timeline builds itself during the incident. Every query is logged: who asked what, and on which legal basis. What the prosecutor receives can be checked step by step.

Belgium is investing heavily in sensors. The next step is making sure that what those sensors see reaches the people who can act on it — within the law.