Fear, sniffer dogs and fighter jets after bomb threats hit European flights

ROME – Nicola Timpone was halfway through an early-morning Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to Rome on Nov 5 when he got the first inkling that his trip would not end smoothly.Timpone, a 62-year-old Italian passenger, said he had heard the pilot say that a technical problem required a diversion to Paris. After a while, he said, the pilot announced that they were actually landing to refuel at another French airport.But a startling scene outside Timpone’s window made clear that it was more than a pit stop.“I saw a military jet,” he said in a telephone interview on Nov 5. “Some of us realised that something was wrong.”More than two dozen flights with hundreds of passengers were disrupted this week after European airlines were targeted by bomb threats, officials said. Planes in Italy, Poland, Spain and elsewhere were grounded or diverted as the authorities scrambled fighter jets to escort the aircraft.After checks, all the threats turned out to be hoaxes, officials said. But some travellers said they had experienced a real – if brief – jolt of alarm. At one point, Timpone said, he saw Aer Lingus cabin crew members opening all the window shades and asking everyone not to use their cellphones.“We were going down and saw all along the runway a deployment of police forces, firefighters, ambulances,” he said from a gym at a French airbase where he and about 150 other passengers were gathered after the flight was diverted. “That really scared us.”Neither the identities of those making the threats nor their motives were immediately clear.Apostolos Tzitzikostas, the European Union’s commissioner for transport, said in a statement on Nov 5 that it was too early to conclude that the episodes were linked. Analysts said that the volume of threats reported over a few days suggested that at least some were connected.Mateusz Bojarski, 28, was on a LOT Polish Airlines flight with his girlfriend, heading from Warsaw to Paris for a romantic weekend, when an announcement over the plane’s intercom said that the aircraft could not take off for safety reasons.The plane taxied to the end of the runway and waited for emergency services, he said, and firefighters and police officers inspected the aircraft with sniffer dogs.“We weren’t so scared,” Bojarski said on Nov 5 in a direct message on social media. He said he had seen reports this week of similar bomb threat scares. Other passengers also seemed calm – if frustrated about potential delays and disruptions, he said. Three hours after their originally scheduled departure time, he said, they were able to take off.When Margherita Cerrai and Giovanni Martinelli, Italian graduate students on a Wizz Air flight from Milan, landed at an out-of-the-way runway in Bucharest, Romania, fire trucks and masked, armed Romanian law enforcement agents met their plane. But they did not panic, they said.The fake bomb threats were “something we had heard about all day yesterday”, Cerrai said.“The fact that there had been so many bomb threats, in my opinion, defused the fear a little,” Martinelli said.Other passengers were already in the air when the threats came in.John May, 45, a passenger on the Aer Lingus plane from Dublin to Rome, said on Nov 5 that it was about one hour into the three-hour flight when the pilot asked the cabin crew to immediately join him in the cockpit. The crew came out looking a bit shaken, May said in a direct message on social media.“That got people worried,” said May, who had been traveling to celebrate his 20th wedding anniversary. His wife was worried but he was not, May said, because the engines sounded normal and the plane was not descending unusually fast.After the pilot announced that there was a bomb threat, he tried to reassure passengers by saying that it was not a credible one, May recalled. Still, the French authorities diverted the plane to a military air base in Evreux, about 80km north-west of Paris.The office of France’s prime minister said in a statement that he had ordered fighter jets to intercept and escort the Aer Lingus flight because the pilot had not “cooperated as expected with the authorities”.It was not immediately clear what that meant. The Evreux prosecutor said in a statement that he had opened an investigation.At the base, passengers waited two hours on the plane as a bomb squad checked their bags, May said. Afterwards, passengers disembarked 10 at a time as officers and sniffer dogs checked them and their bags, according to Timpone, the other Aer Lingus passenger. Buses took them to another location on the base, where they were checked again.Timpone, an art director and head of a local development agency in southern Italy, said that although he travelled around the world for work, “I don’t think I’ll be taking a plane in the next three months”.As he spoke, France’s Civil Protection service was providing food, water and psychological assistance to some of the anxious passengers, who were waiting to be transferred to Paris.“Fortunately, it ended well,” Timpone said. “But these are experiences that leave their mark on you.” NYTIMESThis article originally appeared in The New York Times.