Overview
- Staff in the control tower detected a burning smell and the tower was evacuated at 20:33 on Sunday evening, after which Deutsche Flugsicherung immediately stopped all starts and landings.
- Emergency teams searched the tower and found no open fire, flight control used contingency arrangements and limited operations resumed within about two hours.
- Investigators traced the alarm to a technical defect in a ventilation unit (a fan/drive component) that was replaced and the tower was re‑staffed after medical checks for evacuated controllers.
- The disruption forced roughly 35–40 aircraft to divert and led to around 40 cancellations with many other flights delayed, and authorities granted temporary extensions to Munich’s night‑flight restrictions so more planes could be processed overnight.
- Munich’s layered safety systems — on‑site fire brigade, DFS backup towers and regional control centers — handled the incident and the airport said scheduled operations were largely back to normal the next morning while airlines processed passenger impacts.