Eight hundred grams of Semtex. That was roughly how much of the plastic explosive German investigators say was packed into a tin-can-sized device attached to the drone discovered at Leipzig/Halle airport in Germany on Aug. 4. For perspective, forensic investigators estimated that the bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, contained roughly 350 to 450 grams of Semtex. All 259 people aboard that flight were killed, along with 11 people on the ground.
No one was killed in Leipzig. The drone’s detonator failed, and an airport bus driver managed to kick the device clear of the Ukrainian cargo plane it was apparently targeting. Part of the heavy-lift pipeline that flies NATO’s strategic airlift missions to Ukraine, the Antonov jet was loaded with ammunition. Aviation authorities halted air traffic and diverted several inbound DHL freighters to Hanover after one such flight arriving from Marseille was struck by an object German authorities suspect was a second drone, though it caused only minor damage.
Twice in two years, Leipzig has come close to disaster. The first time was in 2024, when a parcel containing an incendiary device caught fire shortly before it was loaded onto an aircraft at the airport’s DHL hub. Saboteurs linked to Russia are implicated in both cases. Europe cannot afford to bide its time while it decides what deterrence looks like.