Airlines Battle Daily Bomb Hoaxes With No Clue Who's Behind Them

Airlines have spent the week scrambling over bomb threats that keep landing almost every day. All of them have been fake. That doesn't matter much to the carriers — they have no choice but to treat each one as real until proven otherwise, and that means delays, diversions and tarmac searches while passengers wait.

Marco Chan, a former commercial airline pilot and aviation expert at Kingston University, walked through the drill. Crews run a triage system but stick to identical protocols until they're certain there's no danger, he told the BBC, which can mean an inspection mid-air and always a search once the plane is on the ground. Passengers may not even realize anything is wrong until they're told to get off. Chan's take: the hassle is a small price when safety is on the line.

The sight of sniffer dogs and specialist teams combing commercial jets for explosives is alarming, but aviation security expert Paul Mason says the industry absorbs this kind of thing constantly. Planes get diverted every day — sometimes more than a hundred of them — for technical faults, medical emergencies and weather. Those far outnumber the handful grounded by hoaxes, so airlines are well drilled for the unexpected. Don't expect refunds either, he warns, since the disruption isn't the carriers' fault.

What worries the experts more is the randomness. There's little credible intelligence on who's pulling the strings. Emails surfaced claiming an extremist misogynist group had taken credit for a few of the incidents, but the group's founder has since denied it. Beyond that, leads are thin.

Mason, who also spent 20 years in the military, says the pattern carries the fingerprints of hybrid warfare — unconventional tactics like cyber attacks. It feels coordinated, he says, and while Russia has denied any involvement, proxies could be doing the work. It's a cheap way to sow chaos with plausible deniability, and if the perpetrators are using sophisticated technology, tracing them is brutally hard.

There's one deterrent with real teeth. Under the Aviation Security Act 1982, deliberately sending false or misleading information that endangers, or could endanger, an aircraft in flight is a serious criminal offence — and the maximum penalty is life imprisonment. Mason's warning to anyone tempted to join in for a laugh: unless you're very sophisticated, you'll probably be traced, and you'll be facing prison.