Flights in and out of the Hamburg Airport in Germany were canceled until further notice after the authorities responded Saturday night to an armed man who drove his vehicle onto the tarmac and parked near a plane, precipitating a standoff that continued overnight.
About 10 hours into the standoff, which began around 8:30 p.m. local time, the police said that they had established contact with the man inside the car. The police had earlier said he was accompanied by a child passenger and that they believed the situation concerned a “custody dispute.”
The police said he had driven through a gate to get to the tarmac, but declined to say whether he had driven past any security guards.
The man fired at least one shot into the air, Sandra Levgrün, a spokeswoman for the Hamburg Police Department, said in an interview posted on social media. She said that no injuries had been reported. Two small fires were observed on the tarmac early on, though the authorities were still trying to determine if the man had set them.
Passengers aboard the plane near the vehicle and other planes were evacuated and taken to a nearby hotel, the police said.
Video posted on social media showed heavily armed officers escorting a group of passengers across the tarmac to a bus.
The woman who posted the video, Alina Tuider, 32, said her flight home to Vienna was preparing for takeoff just after 8 p.m. when the plane came to a halt.
“We saw armed police running across the field next to our plane,” Ms. Tuider said in a phone interview, adding that her flight had by then been grounded for about an hour. “So we knew there was something going on.”
At one point, she thought she heard a gunshot before later learning about the armed driver from the news on her phone.
Around midnight local time, police evacuated her plane and she was later taken to a hotel.
A spokeswoman for the airport, Katja Bromm, said in an email that the police responded to the airport at 8:24 p.m. local time, prompting it to halt takeoffs and landings.
Twenty-seven flights were then canceled, she added, affecting roughly 3,200 passengers.
In a statement issued shortly before 6 a.m., the police said that flights would remain suspended indefinitely as the police operation continued and told people to stay away from the airport.
