Bomb threats disrupt at least 15 flights across Europe, renewing hybrid warfare fears

Bomb threats have caused diversions and emergency landings for at least 15 flights across Europe, renewing questions about a possibly coordinated effort to disrupt travel.The series of warnings on Thursday morning affected flights between Italy, Ireland, the UK, Spain, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Finland, Austria, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, Greece and Czechia.On Tuesday seven planes across Europe were searched or diverted because of malicious hoax bomb alerts. On Monday a flight from the UK to Bulgaria was diverted after a threat that was apparently without substance.The latest alerts affected flights by Ryanair, Aer Lingus, Wizz Air, Finnair and LOT. All landed safely. Initial searches of some of the planes found nothing suspicious.Two Ryanair flights from Copenhagen and Madrid to Sofia made emergency landings in the Bulgarian capital while a Ryanair flight from London to Sofia was diverted and landed at Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second largest city.A Bulgarian government spokesperson said: “Upon landing, the necessary inspections were carried out in accordance with the applicable procedures and no issues were identified. Airport operations at both Sofia airport and Plovdiv airport have returned to normal.”An Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to Rome was diverted to the Évreux-Fauville military airbase in northern France. A Wizz Air flight from Milan to Warsaw was diverted to Vienna, while a Ryanair flight from Porto and an Aegean Airlines flight from Thessaloniki, both to Milan, were searched upon arrival at Milan’s Malpensa airport.Also affected were a LOT Polish Airlines flight from Warsaw to Brussels, two Finnair flights from Helsinki to Rome and Vienna and four flights by other airlines to Prague.A Czech police spokesperson said: “Security measures at Prague airport have just ended, with pyrotechnic inspections yielding negative results.”The threats against the Finnair flights were “unfounded or hoax”, said an airline representative. “Unfortunately, air traffic is sometimes subject to threats, as we have seen this week, when also other airlines in Europe have faced hoax bomb threats. Threats are almost always unfounded.”The travel disruption followed cyber-attacks this week against supermarket refrigeration systems. Some analysts speculate the disruption, along with drone incursions and triggering of app alerts, is part of a hybrid campaign to unsettle Europe on behalf of Iran, Russia or other state actors.A Kremlin spokesperson said on Thursday it was “absurd” to blame Vladimir Putin’s administration for the hackers who targeted fridges. “We have ​such baseless accusations against our country, implicating it in everything,” Dmitry Peskov told reporters.Many of the affected flights on Thursday were operated by low-cost carriers but there was little discernible pattern surrounding the incidents.The Italian news agency Ansa, citing police sources, said the warning for the Helsinki-Rome and Dublin-Rome flights came from an anonymous email written in Italian and sent to the Rome airport company, ADR, and other affiliated companies. The subject heading was “segnalazione minaccia” (“threat warning”).Aviation experts say fake threats occur daily but that such a multiplicity of credible threats, even if malicious hoaxes, appears to point to coordinated action.Capt Martin Drake, a former airline pilot and technical adviser to the Balpa union, said airlines had security teams who assessed each threat on a traffic light scale: green to keep going or red to be grounded, with an amber option only for flights yet to take off, allowing tighter checks and searches of the plane before clearing it to fly.“If you want to deliberately disrupt a flight, then you need to do so once it’s airborne,” said Drake. Pilots have a QRH – a quick response handbook – whose instructions will probably include to descend quickly as well as divert to the nearest airport on receipt of a red alert. At cruising altitude, “aircraft pressurisation would do a lot of the work of any improvised explosive device”.Diversions are expensive as well as highly disruptive, but airlines have little choice in the face of any remotely credible threat.The ready availability of airline operations information on the internet means that any hoaxer now has a level of detail about the schedules, the type of plane and its technical specifications that would have eluded all but insiders decades ago.Rhys Jones, an analyst at Osprey Flight Solutions, an aviation intelligence firm, said the confidence of airlines in European airport security should not mean any change to normal protocols after the hoaxes, but “one of the natural responses will be to see double-downed security, media coverage and public concern about travelling”.He said the threats seemed linked but “a reasonably chaotic campaign with no particular region targeted”, and while it could weaken future security responses through the normalisation of threats, simply creating disruption could be regarded as a success by those carrying out the hoaxes.