Drones Shut Down Brazil’s Busiest Airport During Carnival

Seven rogue drones forced the closure of São Paulo’s Guarulhos International Airport on Sunday afternoon — peak Carnival travel day — grounding Latin America’s busiest hub for roughly three hours and sending dozens of commercial flights scrambling for alternate runways across southeastern Brazil. The disruption hit on one of the year’s heaviest travel weekends, with hotel occupancy in major cities near 98 percent and Carnival expected to draw 65 million revelers nationwide. This is part of The Rio Times’ daily coverage of Brazil affairs and Latin American financial news.

Pilots first reported the drones around 4:10 p.m. local time, triggering an immediate shutdown. Controllers reopened the airport briefly after 20 minutes, but a LATAM Airbus A320 arriving from Rio reported a drone passing near its left wing during final approach, and the airport was sealed again until 6:40 p.m. Brazil’s civil aviation authority Anac confirmed that 32 flights were diverted to airports in Campinas, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba and Rio de Janeiro, while eight were cancelled outright. LATAM alone reported 22 affected operations; Gol diverted four flights and Azul cancelled three.

Among the rerouted aircraft was an Emirates A380 — the world’s largest passenger plane — which circled over São Paulo before diverting to Rio’s Galeão airport, and a Qatar Airways 777 inbound from Doha. Six LATAM international flights from Lima and Santiago were redirected to Campinas, 100 kilometers away.

São Paulo’s military police deployed a helicopter and a special operations unit armed with signal jammers to neutralize the drones. Federal and state police have opened investigations, but no arrests have been made. The episode is not the first: last June, drones shut Guarulhos down in an incident later linked to cocaine traffickers who used the devices to monitor police movements while smuggling drugs into the terminal.

The recurring shutdowns underscore a regulatory gap that Anac is racing to close. Brazil’s drone fleet has surged 315 percent since 2017, reaching 125,000 registered units, yet enforcement near airports remains weak. The agency opened a public consultation last year to overhaul its drone rules, but the new framework has yet to take effect — leaving Guarulhos, which handles more than 40 million passengers a year, exposed to a threat that a few hundred dollars’ worth of consumer electronics can deliver.

Related coverage: Brazil’s Morning Call | How Brazil’s Fiscal Chaos Is Breeding the Next Populist Wave