France’s Vinci Airports is taking a controlling stake in Gatwick for £2.9bn, a week after the UK’s second-biggest airport was brought to a standstill by a series of drone sightings.

A consortium led by the US investment fund Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) is selling a majority stake of 50.01% in the airport to Vinci Airports, one of the world’s top airport operators and part of the infrastructure group Vinci. Vinci and GIP will manage Gatwick together.

The deal, which was agreed on Thursday, was delayed by the chaos caused by three days of drone sightings in the run-up to Christmas. Gatwick, the eighth-busiest airport in Europe by passenger numbers, was forced to close its runway, disrupting flights for 140,000 passengers.

The airport resumed flights last Friday and has invested £5m in a range of anti-drone technologies over the past few days. Gatwick said there was no single commercial solution available for the type of drone activity seen last week. Vinci’s president, Nicolas Notebaert, said the drone scare was “without precedent” and the group would be looking “very deeply” at the threat.

Gatwick will be the largest in Vinci’s portfolio of 46 airports spread across 12 countries. The French group’s network includes Lyon-Saint-Exupéry airport, Nantes Atlantique and Grenoble Alpes Isère in France; Lisbon and Porto in Portugal, Funchal in Madeira, and Osaka Itami and Kansai International in Japan.

Gatwick’s chair, Sir David Higgins, said the deal was a “vote of confidence in Gatwick and its future potential”. He will stay on, along with the chief executive, Stewart Wingate, who said there would be no changes to the immediate running of the airport. Gatwick employs about 3,000 people and the deal is not expected to have any impact on jobs.

Wingate said: “This is good news for the airport as it will mean both continuity but also further investment for passengers over the coming years to improve our services further.”

The GIP-led consortium bought Gatwick from the airport operator BAA for £1.5bn in 2009 and spent £1.9bn modernising the airport in subsequent years. The shareholders are selling down their stakes, leaving GIP with 21%, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority with 7.9%, Australia’s sovereign wealth fund with 8.6% and two public pension funds in California and South Korea with 6.4% and 6% respectively.

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Notebaert brushed aside concerns over the impact of Brexit, stressing that London was the world’s biggest city for airport travel, ahead of New York.

He added that the looming threat of Brexit had helped Vinci achieve a “very reasonable price” in comparison with the £2bn sale of London City, the capital’s smallest airport with 4 million passengers, two years ago. GIP, which still owns Edinburgh airport, sold London City to a Canadian consortium.

Gatwick operates the busiest single runway in the world and serves 228 destinations in 74 countries. The airport’s new owner vowed to push ahead with a planned 15-year investment programme, including widening its emergency runway and bringing it into daily use as a second runway.

If, following a public consultation that runs until 10 January, Gatwick pushes ahead and obtains planning permission, the runway could potentially be open by 2025 – before Heathrow’s third runway. With two runways Gatwick could serve up to 70 million passengers a year – almost as many as Heathrow today (78 million).

Even without this, Gatwick expects to grow to 60 million passengers a year, by flying more and larger planes on its existing runway.

Last year, the airport handled nearly 46 million passengers, up from 32 million at the time of its previous sale a decade ago, when BAA, owned by the Spanish infrastructure group Ferrovial, was ordered by the Competition Commission to sell Gatwick amid concerns over its dominance of the airport market. The deal ended BAA’s four-decade long monopoly over the capital’s major airports.

Gatwick reported revenues of £764.2m for the year to 31 March, and earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of £411.2m.