So why did one plane divert, and six fly on?

Transcript

1. Around 9:51 on Tuesday morning, a Boeing 737 from London,
2. bound for Warsaw Chopin, turned north, about 50 kilometres out.
3. At 9:54, Modlin airport says, a bomb alert was declared over a threat on board.
4. The plane landed at Modlin at 10:01, with 181 people on board.
5. The airport closed.
6. Border Guard bomb-disposal officers checked the plane.
7. The airline, LOT, said the flight was diverted because of the threat,
8. and that nothing suspicious was found.
9. The track shows where the plane went.
10. Not who chose Modlin.
11. Bomb threats that morning targeted at least 7 passenger flights across Europe.
12. Two into Warsaw.
13. Two to Rome.
14. Two to Sofia.
15. One from Manchester to Murcia.
16. 6 of them landed at their planned destination.
17. One email named both Sofia flights.
18. It reached Bulgarian border police
19. while the flight from Dublin was still over England.
20. That plane landed in Sofia about 3 hours later.
21. We don't know when its crew was told.
22. Two Italian fighter jets escorted a Ryanair flight from Dublin into Rome.
23. So why did one plane divert, and six fly on?
24. Wizz Air gave a reason.
25. Its flight from Bergamo was already approaching Sofia,
26. so no diversion was necessary.
27. For the others that flew on, no reason has been published.
28. Under international rules,
29. air traffic controllers pass a threat to the crew without delay.
30. On the bomb itself, they are told not to advise.
31. One aviation security specialist puts the assessors' question like this:
32. not whether a threat is real, but whether whoever sent it could do what they claim.
33. India faced that question at scale.
34. In 2024, its aviation ministry counted
35. 999 hoax threat messages and calls by mid-November, 666 in October.
36. Mid-wave, it added checks: was the sender anonymous,
37. and had one account sent many threats?
38. That is one country's count of hoaxes.
39. It can't tell us how likely a threat over Europe is to be real.
40. Back to Warsaw.
41. Modlin was the flight's planned backup airport,
42. and Modlin's chief says it was sent there in line with procedures.
43. A Polish aviation website reported a reason:
44. Chopin was busy with the other threatened plane, from Copenhagen.
45. Chopin said its one closed runway didn't significantly affect its work.
46. Neither LOT nor air traffic control has said who chose Modlin.
47. Searches found no explosives on any of those 7 flights.
48. No one has claimed the threats, and officials haven't said who sent them.