The flight bomb threats that struck European aviation twice this week were judged by each state alone. Europe still has no way to read such a wave as one event while the aircraft are in the air.

On Thursday morning an Aer Lingus Airbus flying from Dublin to Rome became the subject of a bomb threat, and French authorities ordered it to land at the Évreux air base in Normandy. Fighter jets were then sent to intercept and escort it; the French prime minister’s office said this was because the pilot “did not cooperate as expected with authorities.” The plane landed safely and, according to the same office’s statement, bomb disposal teams went in while 151 passengers and six crew were brought to safety. No bomb was found. Separately, the regional prosecutor is questioning the pilot and co-pilot as part of an investigation into what happened.

The same morning, Czech police searched four Prague-bound aircraft after anonymous emails, while stating publicly that they judged the credibility of the threats to be low. In Vienna, police treated a message naming four inbound flights as an abstract threat and let operations continue, Associated Press reporting showed. Three Ryanair flights heading for Bulgaria were met by military escorts. One morning brought at least three different readings of the same danger.

That spread is the real story of the week. Governments are already asking who sent the flight bomb threats, and they are right to ask. The deeper defect, however, is structural. The Union writes common rules for how a bag is screened in Lisbon and Helsinki, yet the verdict on a threat against an aircraft in flight is reached by a dozen national authorities, each looking at one message. A hoax campaign lives in that seam. Until the bloc can recognise a wave as one event while it is unfolding, anyone with a mailing list will set the tempo of European airspace.

What the Record Shows

The flight bomb threats did not begin on Thursday. On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported, a LOT service from Heathrow was diverted to Warsaw’s Modlin airport, which closed while the jet was searched, and Italian Eurofighters escorted a Ryanair plane into Rome. Thursday’s wave was larger, with searches or diversions in at least eight member states. Across the week, more than 20 flights were disrupted.

Two of the messages are now public. One named the Aer Lingus aircraft and a Finnair flight from Helsinki; another, seen by AFP at Sofia airport, promised an explosion within the hour. Both bore the signature of the Male State, a Russian misogynist movement founded in 2016 which, according to the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, later backed the war on Ukraine, and which a Russian court outlawed as extremist in 2021.

No government has named a sponsor. Italy’s defence minister, Guido Crosetto, went furthest, describing the threats as part of a strategy to increase chaos and grouping them with the supermarket fridge attacks and drone incursions, though without naming any state. Transport Commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas said it was too early to draw conclusions about any link between the incidents, that national investigations were continuing, and that an EU information-sharing mechanism on aviation security had been activated. He told reporters there was no information yet on whether a cyberattack lay behind the messages. The signature settles little. A movement banned by a Russian court is a convenient flag for anyone, whether a state service seeking distance or a copycat seeking attention. Europe has met this form before: after a run of hoax bomb threats against schools, courts, and public buildings in 2024, the head of Czech intelligence spoke of a visible Russian trace.

The Case for Keeping the Verdict National

The present arrangement has a serious defence, and it deserves a fair hearing. A threat against a flight in progress must be decided in minutes. Those best placed to decide are the people who know the airport, the airline, the crew, and the airspace. Regulation (EC) No 300/2008, the Union’s framework for civil aviation security, follows that logic. It sets common basic standards, but it asks each member state to designate a single authority to coordinate and monitor those standards, and to run its own national security programme.

Pilots’ representatives point to well-tested mechanisms, including a red, amber, and green grading of threats and rapid notification of crews. Caution also weighs against central interference. One genuine device hidden among a flood of false ones is the scenario every assessor fears, and no official in Brussels should be able to overrule a commander who believes an aircraft is unsafe. Taken one at a time, airlines and ministers described the responses as standard procedure, which is why no single one of them reveals the problem.

What One Assessor Cannot See

The weakness lies not in any one call but in what each assessor is asked to judge when flight bomb threats arrive. A security officer in Prague sees an anonymous email. A duty officer in Normandy sees a request for a fighter escort. Neither can count on learning, in the hour that matters, that the same signature, the same countdown, and much of the same wording are reaching airports from Dublin to Sofia. The pattern that would raise or lower the danger exists only at European level, and nobody is tasked with reading it in real time.

The mechanism the Commission activated on Thursday is, as the Commissioner described it, a channel for authorities to share information. It is not a body that tells the people making the decision that the message in front of them belongs to a wider series of flight bomb threats. That distinction matters most in exactly the minutes when an aircraft is still airborne.

The gap has a price, and the sender pays none of it. Philip Baum of Coventry University estimated that each disruption can cost an airline up to $250,000, while military escorts are paid for by governments. Jacob Funk Kirkegaard of Bruegel described the threats as “stress-testing” whether governments and airports coordinate their response. This week offered little reassurance on that point. An email costs nothing to send; a pair of Eurofighters is expensive to launch. Every round of flight bomb threats teaches its author which capitals scramble jets, which close runways, and which carry on.

A Shared Picture, Not a Shared Decision

The remedy does not require moving authority to Brussels. It requires moving knowledge faster than the hoax. Three steps would close most of the gap.

First, the Union should build a standing threat-pattern cell on top of the mechanism switched on this week, staffed around the clock by Commission aviation security officials, Europol, and national liaison officers. Its sole task would be to match incoming threats across borders and alert every national assessor, within minutes, when the text on their screen has already reached other airports. Such a flag would decide nothing. It would inform every decision.

Second, member states should agree a common grading vocabulary for waves of flight bomb threats, so that “low credibility” in Prague and a fighter escort over Normandy rest on the same reading of the same evidence. National authorities would keep the final word. They would simply stop reaching it in isolation.

Third, each wave should be followed by a published EU account of the flights affected, the duration of each diversion, and the public cost of the response. Hoax campaigns depend on their targets absorbing losses quietly. A public ledger turns that loss into a policy fact, one that capitals can weigh against the modest price of better coordination.

None of this waits on attribution. Investigators may need months to establish who wrote the emails and why. Europe does not need that answer to decide how it will read the next wave of flight bomb threats. With Ireland holding the Council presidency and its own flag carrier diverted to a French air base this week, Dublin is well placed to put the question before ministers now. Another wave will come. What remains open is whether Europe meets it as a single campaign or as a dozen separate surprises.