A large part of Airbus’s global fleet was grounded after the European airplane maker discovered a technical malfunction linked to solar radiation in its A320 family of aircraft. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency announced on Friday evening that it was temporarily pausing flights on certain Airbus planes after a JetBlue flight from Florida to Mexico had to make an emergency landing after a sudden loss of altitude. Media reports indicate that some 15 people were hospitalized after the incident. Airbus said in a statement late Friday that it had identified an issue with its workhorse A320 planes. “Intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls,” it said, adding that it had “identified a significant number” of affected aircraft. A number of airlines around Europe announced that they were affected, including Lufthansa, Swiss and Austrian Airlines. Brussels Airlines said that none of its flights was impacted. Sara Ricci, communications chief for Airbus’s commercial aircraft division, said that some 6,000 aircraft were affected, but that for 85 percent of the impacted aircraft, it would be a “quick fix” to the planes’ software. “The vast majority will be back in the sky very soon,” Ricci said.

Unidentified drones affected Belgian airports from Thursday evening into Friday morning, amid an escalating crisis in the European skies. Liège Airport briefly suspended air traffic twice, around 10 p.m. on Thursday night and again Friday morning around 6 a.m., each time for about an hour, according to public broadcaster VRT. The airport handles mainly cargo, with only a few passenger flights each day. Brussels airport also had to divert one flight to Amsterdam Thursday night after a drone was detected nearby. Air traffic at Brussels Airport was disrupted by more drone sightings on Tuesday evening. As the continent’s issues become more widespread — and some European governments have pointed the finger of blame at Russia — drones were also spotted over Antwerp’s port area on Thursday night. For consecutive nights on Tuesday and Wednesday, drones were also observed above the Royal School for Non-Commissioned Officers in the Flemish city of Sint-Truiden. Belgium held a National Security Council meeting Thursday, after which Interior Minister Bernard Quintin said that authorities had the situation “under control.” Defense Minister Theo Francken vowed to strengthen Belgium’s National Air Security Center (NASC). “The NASC in Bevekom must be fully operational by January 1,” he wrote in a social media post. “This center will ensure better monitoring and protection of Belgian airspace and prepare Belgium for future challenges in air security,” he added.

President Donald Trump on Monday insisted the U.S. is going “full steam ahead” on a major nuclear-powered submarine pact, ending months of uncertainty over whether his administration would keep the alliance with Australia and the U.K. The Pentagon announced this summer that it was reviewing the deal, known as AUKUS, fueling angst in Canberra and London that the Trump administration might walk away from a rare agreement to expand production of nuclear submarines and partner on tech to ward off China. But Trump gave his support Monday at a White House meeting with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, where leaders sought to reset the tone of the relationship after weeks of speculation about the pact’s future. “We’re just going now full steam ahead,” Trump said when asked about the deal. “They’re building magnificent holding pads for the submarines. It’s going to be expensive. You wouldn’t believe the level of complexity and how expensive it is.” Canberra has committed billions to develop submarine and naval shipbuilding facilities in western Australia, designed to host and maintain U.S. and U.K. nuclear-powered submarines while revving up construction of new ones. The new infrastructure would turn Australia into a hub for allies and their submarines in the region, all aimed as a bulwark against China. Navy Secretary John Phelan, at the meeting, said the plan is to “take the original AUKUS framework and improve it for all three parties, and make it better, clarify some of what was in the prior agreement.” Trump, who is expected to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the coming weeks, said he views AUKUS as a deterrent against Beijing but not a step toward a confrontation. And he dismissed the idea of a conflict over Taiwan. “We’ll be just fine with China,” he said. “First of all, the United States is the strongest military power in the world by far.” Trump and Albanese also signed a deal for critical minerals and rare-earth elements, formalizing joint investments between the two countries to strengthen non-Chinese supply chains for materials crucial for defense and high-tech manufacturing. Officials negotiated it over the last few months, Trump said. Albanese described it as an AUD $8.5 billion pipeline, with joint contributions over the next six months. “Australia has had a view for some time — it’s similar to putting America first,” he said. “Our plan is called ‘A Future Made in Australia,’ which is about not just digging things up and exporting them, but making sure we have supply chains where our friends can benefit.” The mineral push comes amid increasing trade tensions between the U.S. and Beijing, which has tightened export controls on rare-earth elements and permanent magnets. Both are vital for defense and high-tech products. Trump reiterated his threat to levy hefty tariffs on China if it does not relent on the new trade restrictions. “They threatened us with rare earths, and I threatened them with tariffs,” he said. “We could stop the airplane parts, too. We build their airplanes.”

WARSAW — Poland and Latvia imposed sweeping restrictions on civilian flights along their eastern borders after Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace in the early hours of Wednesday. The Polish restrictions went into effect at 10 p.m. on Wednesday, covering a zone running along the border with Ukraine and Belarus. They will remain in place until midnight Dec. 9, the maximum one-time extent allowed by regulations. PANSA, the Polish air traffic agency, laid out the new rules in a statement. The Latvian restrictions go into effect on Thursday at 6 p.m. in a zone along the country’s borders with Russia and Belarus and will remain into effect at least until Sept. 18, with the possibility of extension, the government said. In the Polish zone, only military aircraft are permitted in the zone from sunset to sunrise. During daylight hours, flights will be allowed only if they meet strict conditions such as filing a flight plan, carrying active transponders and maintaining constant radio communication with air traffic control.  Military jets on quick reaction alerts, known by the NATO call signs GARDA or ALPHA SCRAMBLE, will be authorized to operate.  Civilian drones are banned at all times, PANSA also specified. Exemptions include flights with official status, including HEAD for heads of state, STATE for government missions, SAR for search and rescue, HOSP and MEDEVAC for medical evacuations, and FFR for firefighting response.  Flights not meeting the listed requirements may still be authorized if they involve state aviation or air ambulances, if they are carried out to protect human or animal life and health in cases such as natural disasters, accidents, ecological threats or other emergencies, or if they are linked to the protection and monitoring of critical infrastructure. In Latvia, Defense Minister Andris Sprūds said the measure will allow the country to better control the restricted airspace, make it easier to detect threats and free up the area for NATO’s Baltic Air Policing mission. “Russian unmanned aerial vehicles in NATO airspace are a warning signal, and we must do everything possible to prevent an escalation of drone attacks,” Sprūds said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine was ready to help with efforts to combat Russian drone incursions.  “We are ready to provide technology, crew training, and necessary intelligence data …  Ukraine proposes to defend airspace in a coordinated, thoughtful and joint manner,” Zelenskyy said in a statement published on social media.  Laura Kayali contributed to this report.

The Bulgarian government on Thursday reversed course as it clarified it had no evidence that Russia jammed GPS signals to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s plane when it landed at a local airport on Sunday — despite initially making the claim itself.  On Thursday, Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov told parliament that the Commission president’s plane had not been disrupted but had only experienced a partial signal interruption, the kind typically seen in densely populated areas.  “After checking the plane’s records, we saw that there was no indication of concern from the pilot. Five minutes the aircraft hovered in the waiting area, with the quality of the signal being good all the time,” he told lawmakers.  The prime minister had previously said the disturbance was due to unintended consequences of electronic warfare in the Ukrainian conflict.  Deputy Prime Minister and Transport Minister Grozdan Karadzhov, also denied there was evidence of disruption to the GPS signal of the Commission president’s flight.  “According to empirical data, according to the radio detection, the records of our agencies, civilian and military, there is not a single fact supporting the claim to silence the GPS signal that affected the plane,” Karadzhov told Bulgarian broadcaster bTV on Thursday.  On Monday, the Financial Times reported that a Commission-chartered plane on a tour of “front-line states” in Europe reportedly lost access to GPS signals while approaching Bulgaria’s Plovdiv airport. The correspondent who was on the plane wrote that the aircraft landed using paper maps and quoted an official saying it circled the airport for an hour. Brussels and Sofia were quick to blame Russia, calling it “blatant interference.”  The incident made headlines across Europe and prompted reactions from U.S. President Donald Trump, NATO’s Secretary-General Mark Rutte and other top officials. In past days, analysts have questioned the details of the incident, pointing to flight-tracking data revealing that the GPS signal was never lost and that the plane’s landing was only delayed by nine minutes. Public data also showed the same aircraft had experienced GPS jamming the day before over the Baltics — but not in Bulgaria. European Commission spokesperson Arianna Podestà on Thursday said the institution was informed by Bulgarian authorities of GPS jamming, echoing a press release shared by the country’s governent authorities on Monday. “We have never been speaking of the targeting ourselves and I was very clear in saying that we had no informationin this sense. But we are extremely well aware that this is a matter that occurs in our skies and in our seas on a constant manner since the start of the war and therefore this is why its important to tackle it together with our member states,” she told reporters at a briefing in Brussels.

The European Court of Human Rights on Wednesday ruled Russia is responsible for downing flight MH17 in 2014 and human rights violations during its war in Ukraine. The decision marks the first time an international court has found Russia guilty of international human rights abuses since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, and ruled on Russia’s role in the MH17 disaster. The judges are set to rule on a total of four cases, brought against Russia by Ukraine and the Netherlands, including the abduction of Ukrainian children to Russia in 2014 and violations during the armed conflict in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Donbas. “In none of the conflicts previously before [the Court had] there been such near universal condemnation of the ‘flagrant’ disregard by the respondent State for the foundations of the international legal order established after the Second World War,” said the Strasbourg-based court in its judgment. Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014, when it was hit by a surface-to-air missile over eastern Ukraine, during the conflict between pro-Russia rebels and Ukrainian forces in the region. All 298 passengers on board were killed, among them 196 Dutch citizens. In November 2022, a Dutch court found guilty of murder and sentenced (in absentia) to life imprisonment Russian nationals Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinskiy and Ukrainian national Leonid Kharchenko. Girkin, a pro-war Russian nationalist, was also sentenced by Russia to four years on charges of inciting extremism after complaining too much about President Vladimir Putin’s leadership of the war against Ukraine. The Dutch court also confirmed a previous Dutch-led joint international investigation concluded in 2018 that the airliner was downed by a surface-to-air missile launched from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory in Eastern Ukraine. In January 2023, a Dutch court ruled that the Netherlands could bring a case before the European Court of Human Rights over the downing of the flight. It argued that Russia was responsible for the crash, due to its support for the self-proclaimed republics of Luhansk and Donetsk. Russian authorities have repeatedly denied any involvement in the attack. The United Nations Aviation Council found Russia responsible for downing the plane in May, stating that it failed to uphold its obligations under international air law, which requires that states “refrain from resorting to the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight.” The ECHR, an international court of the Council of Europe, stated that it had jurisdiction to rule on complaints concerning events that occurred before Sept. 16, 2022, when Russia was excluded from the organization.

On his way to a summit of NATO leaders, U.S. President Donald Trump undermined the alliance’s core collective defense promise — injecting tension into a gathering designed to keep him interested in European security. Asked whether the United States remains committed to NATO’s Article 5 clause, Trump told reporters on Air Force One: “Depends on your definition. There are numerous definitions of Article 5. You know that, right? But I’m committed to being their friends.” “I’m committed to saving lives. I’m committed to life and safety. And I’m going to give you an exact definition when I get there. I just don’t want to do it on the back of an airplane.” On Wednesday, NATO leaders are expected to formally agree to a new defense spending target of 5 percent of gross domestic product — a sharp increase from the current 2 percent benchmark and something that Trump has been demanding for months. While NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has insisted publicly that the new objective is not designed “for an audience of one,” a private, obsequious message leaked by Trump himself highlights that the gathering’s choreography is mostly designed to provide the U.S. president with a win and to keep him from abandoning the alliance. “Donald, you have driven us to a really, really important moment for America and Europe, and the world. You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done,” Rutte wrote, according to a screenshot posted by Trump on Truth Social. “Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win.” The NATO secretary-general also congratulated the U.S. president for his “decisive action in Iran.” Trump also said he spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Asked aboard Air Force One about the ongoing exchange of long-range missile fire between Iran and Israel, Trump revealed a recent call with the Russian leader and that he was still looking to strike a deal with the Kremlin boss on ending the war in Ukraine. “As you know Vladimir called me up. He said, ‘Can I help you with Iran?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t need help with Iran. I need help with you.'” After U.S. and Israeli strikes targeted Iranian nuclear sites, Tehran retaliated with attacks on American assets in Qatar and Israeli positions as well as civilian infrastructure. A tentative ceasefire is now under threat. Trump also said he would probably meet Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy while in The Hague.

For the second time in two months, President Donald Trump on Wednesday touted a “deal” with China. There’s one problem: It’s largely the same deal the two countries agreed to last month. And the initial readouts of the handshake agreement underscore just how far the Trump administration is from achieving its larger goals in the trade negotiations with Beijing. “The two sides have already met once to try to de-escalate and basically agree to stop punching each other in the face with extreme tariffs,” said Emily Kilcrease, a former deputy assistant U.S. Trade Representative from 2019 to 2021. “And now they’ve come back together to say ‘Yes, we’ve already agreed we should stop punching each other in the face. Let’s actually stick to it this time.’” Speaking late Tuesday in front of the ornate London mansion where they’d just held two days of talks, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told reporters the world’s two largest economies had agreed to ratchet back actions both sides have taken since they announced an initial deal to cool tensions on May 12. The “framework,” as officials from both countries described it, still needs to be approved by Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and many elements remain outstanding. But the emerging details suggest the Trump administration is at a disadvantage. While the U.S. is promising additional concessions on the export of certain sensitive products to China and restarting Chinese student visas, Beijing has only recommitted to a pledge it made a month ago — lifting its blockade on shipments of critical minerals, which are essential components of everything from cars to computers to defense equipment. China controlled nearly 70 percent of the world’s mine production of those minerals in 2024, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. And control of that spigot is proving to be the ultimate pressure point in any tit-for-tat trade war. “This is another band aid,” said Derek Scissors, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the chief economist of the China Beige Book, a report that publishes data on the Chinese economy. “The Chinese can decide six months from now, ‘we don’t like what you said about the party,’ or ‘somebody was mean to Xi Jinping.’ They can decide that and cut off rare earths again.” One person close to the White House and in touch with the delegation in London acknowledged the advances made in the latest round of meetings are small and tentative. “The administration knows that any deal with China isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, but they can at least try to move the ball forward,” said the person, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the state of negotiations. “This is not a trade deal. It’s a framework and there’s still a lot of details to be negotiated.” The Trump administration, however, hinted at how desperate it is to restart the flow of critical minerals from China by offering to partially remove one of its biggest sources of leverage against China: export controls on sensitive technologies. In his remarks to reporters Tuesday night, Lutnick said some of the export restrictions the U.S. has imposed on China in recent months on things like airplane parts and semiconductors and software would “come off … in a balanced way, when they approve the [critical minerals’] licenses.” Kilcrease called that a “very dangerous precedent.” “There was always this view that the U.S. will impose export controls because it’s a matter of national security, and because it’s a matter of national security, we don’t negotiate over it. Now you’ve given China an opening in every single future conversation to come back in and push the United States on export controls,” she said. “And they’re not just going to push on the kind of new export controls that were put in place for leverage. They’re also going to push on the chip controls, the AI controls, all of the controls that they have hated for decades. We just opened the door to that.” Dating back to the first Trump administration, the U.S. has used export controls as aggressively, if not more, than tariffs to reshape the U.S. relationship with China. The Trump administration has taken steps to widen that effort since the start of his second term in office, targeting lower grade chips used in everyday electronic devices, beyond what’s traditionally considered sensitive technology. Senior officials, particularly Lutnick, have vowed to strengthen controls and step up enforcement. Despite those pledges, the U.S. faces pressure from top business leaders to loosen controls and allow greater access to the Chinese market, a pressure that isn’t matched in China’s authoritarian government. Meanwhile, China holds a near monopoly on the global supply of rare earths — metallic elements essential to both civilian and military applications. And since December Beijing has imposed export restrictions on 11 such minerals as a second front in its deepening trade war with the U.S. and other Western countries. All of those minerals are on the U.S. Geological Survey’s list of 50 “critical minerals” essential to “the U.S. economy and national security.” They include antimony, necessary to produce munitions, samarium which goes into precision weaponry and germanium which is a key to the production of military night vision equipment. The U.S. has begun taking steps to develop its own rare earth mining and refining capabilities, starting under former President Joe Biden. But it remains decades behind Beijing in terms of domestic production and processing facilities, partly because of China’s own strategic and largely state-backed investments and efforts to flood the global supply chain. China’s dominance over that supply chain, and the U.S.’s relatively small stockpile, makes it possible to put pressure on the U.S. side in a way that the administration has struggled to replicate. “China has always had this trump card, they know how to use it, they’ve done it in the past and there’s no reason to suspect that they wouldn’t play it going forward,” said Marc Busch who has advised both USTR and the Commerce Department on technical trade barriers and is now a professor of international business diplomacy at Georgetown University. It is unclear how long this current trade truce will hold. Beijing isn’t completely toning down its rhetoric despite the temporary reprieve. China’s Commerce Ministry described the export restrictions on rare earths as “common international practice” due to their “military and civilian purposes” in an X post Monday. And Chinese state news agency Xinhua called criticism of those curbs “misleading hype” and defended them as a “responsible measure to uphold international nonproliferation measures” in an X post Tuesday. The Chinese government, meanwhile, has not commented on the framework agreement reached in London, beyond vague statements by its delegation heads. China’s lead international trade negotiator, Li Chenggang, told reporters, per Chinese state media that “the two sides have agreed in principle the framework for implementing consensus.” Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng called the London meeting “an important consultation” without elaborating on its details, Chinese state media reported Wednesday. Beijing took a more gloating tone in a Xinhua state news agency oped published Wednesday that portrayed the Trump administration as the loser in its trade spat with China. “Washington was forced to spend billions in subsidies to offset farm losses, while companies struggled with rising costs of imported parts. The net effect has been supply chain chaos, business uncertainty and a lack of any clear strategic gain,” said the oped. Still, one Trump ally said that framework marks “a critical step and traditional sign of progress in trade negotiations.” “Beyond Geneva, it opens up the ongoing negotiations. Progress on trade agreements is always incremental, complexity takes time,” said the Trump ally, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the negotiations with China. “Both sides have political and economic vital interests to protect and advance.” Trump, meanwhile, continues to push for a face-to-face meeting with Xi, which has been a diplomatic focus for much of his second term. After a call with Xi last week, Trump said that he had invited the Chinese Communist Party leader to the White House and that he had accepted an invitation to China and would visit “at a certain point.” Any such meeting could hold more water than the formal negotiations, which have been led by Trump’s triumvirate on trade: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Greer and now Lutnick. “Unless we get a Trump-Xi meeting, I don’t see that we can write an agreement that will stand,” Scissors said. “And it won’t stand, because the Chinese will remain aggressive as they have been the entire time Xi Jinping has been in his party position, which is now 12 and a half years, and because the US will remain volatile While Donald Trump is president.”

AMSTELVEEN, Netherlands — Winnie de Wit is very familiar with jet engines — between 400 and 700 airplanes roar over her house in Assendelft, a small town 30 kilometers north of Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, every day and night. Enraged local neighbors want the noise cut. Airlines and the city want it to remain a crucial hub. The fight has entangled the central government, Amsterdam’s city administration, the courts, local activists, airlines and business groups, the European Commission and even the United States.  Meanwhile, other European airports are looking on nervously, worrying they’ll be next as the aviation industry runs into growing climate and environmental challenges. The battle over the airport has become so bitter that it’s even given rise to a new Dutch word, schiphollen, meaning “manipulation, lies and distortion of facts,” something people living near the airport say they’ve been subjected to. It all comes down to noise. Despite being located only 15 kilometers from the heart of Amsterdam, Schiphol is the EU’s busiest airport by flight numbers, last year seeing 473,814 flights. The government is planning to set a limit of 478,000 flights as of later this year — and the European Commission has given its conditional approval. But residents say that’s still way too many. De Wit says that the noise is affecting her quality of life. “Once I took my granddaughter outside to play, and in 15 minutes I counted 14 planes,” she said, showing on her phone a list of aircraft recorded with an app developed by grassroots anti-noise groups. According to Schiphol Airport, 142,400 people were seriously disturbed by airport noise in 2019, while 17,522 had severely disturbed sleep. Anti-noise NGOs say the real numbers are much higher. But the airline industry worries that a low flight limit will choke off growth at Schiphol and harm their bottom lines.  “We’re not shying away from the desire of the Dutch state to reduce noise. We just want it done following a logical way of doing it, that does not disproportionately hit us,” said Benjamin Smith, CEO of Air France-KLM, speaking in late March. King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, a licensed commercial pilot, occasionally flies with KLM as a guest pilot. | Franck Robichon/EFE via EPA The airport is responsible for about 1 percent of Dutch GDP and over 100,000 jobs. The sector is so important that King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, a licensed commercial pilot, occasionally flies with KLM as a guest pilot. The far-right Freedom Party of Geert Wilders — the largest party in parliament — campaigned on a pro-Schiphol platform in the 2023 election. The airport “should continue to grow,” the party said. But if politicians don’t come up with a solution, it may be imposed on the government by the courts. Dutch judges have a track record of making drastic decisions affecting entire sectors, such as agriculture, in order to protect the environment and people’s health. Former Prime Minister Mark Rutte tried to solve the problem in 2023 by imposing a cap of 460,000 flights. But that sparked a backlash from both the EU and the U.S., and his government announced a hurried retreat after failing to get the Commission’s approval. TECH FIXES The industry feels the new proposed limit of 478,000 is far too low, and took the matter to court. Rather than limit flights, it argues that advances in airplane and engine design will do enough to cut noise. “The government says, ‘We want 20 percent less noise.’ The aircraft that we have bought, and that [manufacturers] are going to produce, [are] 20 percent less noisy. So we don’t understand why there’s an issue and why there has to be reduction in slots,” Air France-KLM’s Smith said. Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, which operates only a few routes from Schiphol, is even more optimistic. “The new aircraft we’re buying from Boeing … [are] 50 percent quieter” than previous models, he said. But Roberto Merino-Martinez, an aeronautics and aircraft noise researcher at the Delft University of Technology, said such a reduction won’t halve the total sound emitted by planes that can be heard by the human ear, and that promising a percentage reduction is often a “red flag,” given the logarithmic nature of noise measurement. In its recent decision on the flight cap, the Commission set a number of conditions for its introduction. It urged the government to fully consider “the potential of fleet renewal to reduce aircraft noise” or other noise-reducing flight procedures, such as innovative landing and navigation techniques. The ambiguous decision disappointed many locals. The Commission’s demands “are exactly what the industry lobbies put forward all the time, almost literally. That’s quite disturbing,” said Stefan Molenaar, who lives in Assendelft, the same town as de Wit. President and CEO of KLM Marjan Rintel, CEO of Air France-KLM Benjamin Smith and Dutch Minister of Infrastructure and Public Works Barry Madlener in the KLM Airbus A321neo aircraft. | Ramon Van Flymen/EFE via EPA “The European Union is a very good institution for the consumers. But it’s not always a good institution for citizens,” said Matt Poelmans, a retired civil servant who lives about 30 kilometers south of Schiphol. About 400 airplanes fly over his house every day, and he has installed a special microphone on his roof to prove the noise pollution. “Living comes before flying,” reads the banner in Dutch that Poelmans has carried at several demonstrations against the country’s government — which residents say is too accommodating to the airline industry. ROARING ENGINES The government has a brutal message for people bothered by the noise: “I say to local residents: don’t expect Schiphol to disappear. If it’s going to define your life, you have to ask yourself if it’s healthy to stay here,” Dutch Infrastructure Minister Barry Madlener said in January. The industry also questions the impact of capping the number of flights even at the current fairly high level. “If you have somebody who wakes up [due to] the approach of an aircraft during the night, does it really matter if it’s eight times an hour or seven times an hour?” asked Seth van Straten, vice president for mainport strategy at KLM. Molenaar is one of the citizens who took the Dutch government to court, which found the state to be in violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects a person’s private and family life and home. That ruling prompted Madlener, who declined POLITICO’s request for an interview, to propose the flight cap to the European Commission. To comply with the Commission’s request to limit airport capacity only as a last resort, the government will impose differentiated airport charges to encourage airlines to use their quietest aircraft. “Put together, the government expects these measures to have a significant impact: 15 percent less people experiencing severe noise nuisance by November 2025,” said Richard Funnekotter, spokesperson for the Ministry of Infrastructure, in a written response. SKEPTICAL PUBLIC It’s not the first time Molenaar has heard such promises. “A lot of people don’t believe our government anymore, so they stopped complaining because they feel schiphollen,” he said. While the industry is bridling at the limits, locals and the Amsterdam city government feel they’re too generous. “We want a shrinkage to 400,000 flights and the closure [of the airport] at night,” said Amsterdam’s Deputy Mayor Hester van Buren, who is in talks with local governments across Europe to push the EU to do more about aircraft noise. Natuur en Milieu, a Dutch green NGO, wants the airport to rethink its business model and focus less on transfer passengers — who account for about a third of traffic — and instead concentrate on serving the Dutch national market. If the cap does go into effect, it would be a big victory for the activists who have fought Schiphol for decades, said Bert van Mourik, a program leader with the NGO. “Finally, for the first time in Europe, there’s an airport where a reduction has been put in place. It’s not the reduction we wanted. It doesn’t make that big of a change at the moment, but we can still be happy with that … I do celebrate it as a victory,” he said. That’s a message that will be heard loud and clear in cities like Paris, Brussels, Dublin, Madrid and Warsaw, where growing airports are clashing with local activists. But not everyone wants fewer airplanes flying out of Schiphol. Not far from the Polderbaan, Schiphol’s busiest runway, is a plane-spotting area that attracts tourists and photographers. “Some people are crazy,” said Gerard, waiting with his professional reflex camera to snap his favorite aircraft, when asked about the noise complaints. “I want more planes, they are not enough.”

BRUSSELS — EU airports are pushing the European Commission to follow in the tracks of the U.K. and scrap rules limiting European air passengers passing through high tech security checkpoints to 100-milliliter mini bottles. ACI Europe, the main airport lobby, sent a letter — seen by POLITICO — to Transport Commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas on Thursday calling for a rethink of the bloc’s more restrictive approach. “This is impacting passengers as regards the carriage of liquids, slowing down operational processes, increasing waiting times and requiring additional security screening staff — which will lead to disruptions during the peak summer months if these restrictions are not lifted by the end of the month,” the letter said.  The liquid limit has seen radical shifts in policy that airports complain cost them a fortune. EDS CB C3 screening technology (also known as C3 scanners) allows passengers to avoid the infamous 100-ml limitation — introduced in 2006 due to terrorist threats — and keep their liquids in their bags at security checkpoints.  The scanners have been installed at major hubs such as Munich, Rome, Frankfurt and Milan, as well as at smaller airports like Palma de Mallorca and Vilnius. But the Commission banned the practice in September as a “precautionary measure not in response to any new threat but addresses a temporary technical issue.” That eliminated the main incentive for airports to invest in C3 scanners, which are “on average eight times more expensive than the conventional X-ray screening machines they are replacing, while operating maintenance costs are four times higher,” ACI Europe said in reaction to the EU decision. The liquid limit has seen radical shifts in policy that airports complain cost them a fortune. | Stefan Zaklin/EPA Similar restrictions were introduced in the U.K., but the country backtracked in April and once again allows larger liquid containers. That has the industry calling on the EU to follow suit. EU airports feel that they “continue to be left with a slow, opaque and bureaucratic process no longer suited to address the security demands of a geopolitically unstable world, putting EU airports at a distinct disadvantage in terms of innovation, costs, operational efficiency — and ultimately their competitive position,” the letter said. ACI Europe wants the Commission to allow C3 scanners to be “certified by the EU at the earliest — and in any case before 1 July 2025.” The process to change the policy is ongoing and “new equipment could be validated shortly,” Commission spokesperson for transport Anna-Kaisa Itkonen said in an emailed statement. “The testing and validation of screening equipment are conducted according to procedures established by the European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC),” she said, adding that the Commission “has been urging all participating ECAC member states to expedite their efforts and promptly submit the required documentation and test results.”