European airlines were hit by another coordinated wave of apparent bomb hoaxes on Thursday, just days after a similar round of threats disrupted at least eight flights on Tuesday. So far 18 flights bound for airports in Italy, Bulgaria, Czechia, Spain, Belgium, Poland, Austria and Romania have been affected, with two more aircraft inspected on runways at British airports after separate threats.
In each case the pattern has been the same: a threat communicated to an airline, usually by email, followed by the aircraft being grounded and searched by specialist police. No explosives have been found in any of the incidents either Tuesday or Thursday.
The most dramatic episode came Thursday morning when an Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to Rome, carrying six crew and 151 passengers, was intercepted by a French Rafale fighter jet and escorted to a military base near Paris. Flight-tracking data suggests the aircraft may have been flying directly over Paris when the threat became known.
As on Tuesday, a cluster of countries appears to bear the brunt of the disruption. Poland, Bulgaria, Italy and Spain were all targeted earlier in the week, and that same group accounts for 13 of Thursday’s affected flights, even as the threats have spread to a wider set of nations. The number of incidents climbed steadily through the morning, and officials warned more aircraft could still be diverted, grounded or delayed for inspection.
No individual or group has been publicly blamed for the threats, and investigators have not established a confirmed link between the two waves of hoaxes this week.
European Union transport commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas said it was “too early to draw conclusions on whether the reported incidents are linked.”
With the EU’s 27 member states all potentially exposed to this kind of disruption, the repeated hoaxes raise pointed questions about the vulnerability of civil aviation to cheap, low-risk sabotage, and about how authorities intend to deter copycat threats while the source of the current wave remains unidentified.
