Vandalism or 'hybrid war'? The strange case of dozens of false bomb threats against European planes in four days

"The incidents highlight growing concerns about aviation security, the possibility that this was a coordinated disruption, and the operational cost of addressing the threats."

This is how the American newsletter specialized in Intelligence The Cipher Brief concluded yesterday its note about the wave of false bomb threats to the air traffic system in Europe. According to the Reuters news agency, a minimum of 27 planes, including four from Iberia and two from Air Europa, had been affected by the crisis, which escalated in mid-afternoon with explosive alerts at the British Heathrow airports - the largest in Europe by traffic - in London and Birmingham. UK civil aviation bodies downplayed those last two threats, which did not cause evacuations or closures of sections of those airport facilities.

"I don't think we've ever seen anything like this," the CEO of the airline Air France-KLM, Ben Smith, told the British newspaper Financial Times. Indeed, in recent years there have been several cases of waves of false bomb threats to planes and airports in France, Serbia and India. But never something that affects no less than 16 different countries. Although the national authorities, who manage air traffic in the EU, have not given a full account of the incidents, they present a number of common elements that suggest the possibility that this is more than a mere act of vandalism. All the planes are from European airlines, and they made international flights to and from the continent. The vast majority received the threats when they had already taken off, through emails to the airlines or airport authorities. And yesterday's 'tsunami' is nothing more than the continuation of the one that began on Monday, with one flight, and intensified on Tuesday, with seven more.

For all these reasons, the chances of this coordinated action intensifying in the coming days seem high, although the European Commissioner for Transport, Apostolos Tzitzikostas, has said that it is too early to determine whether the incidents are related. The most that is known is that one of the emails, which arrived at the Rome airport, attributed the non-existent bomb to The Male State Fighters, a Russian far-right group banned by Vladimir Putin's regime, although it is an enthusiastic defender of the invasion of Ukraine.

The incidents suggest a case of hybrid warfare. Programming an email account - an email service that has some 1.8 billion users around the world - to send emails at specific times takes approximately five seconds, and the disruptive effect The Cipher Brief talks about is evident. A conservative estimate of the passengers and crew on a normal plane brings the number of people directly affected to well over 2,000. According to the Associated Press news agency, a single incident of this type can cost an airline close to 250,000 euros. The cost/benefit ratio, thus, is excellent for the authors of the actions.

Vladimir Putin's regime has carried out similar acts, combining hooliganism or petty crime with political objectives, as part of its 'asymmetric war' against Europe to make it withdraw its support for Ukraine. An example is the burning of the private home of the then British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, a prominent defender of Ukraine, which was coordinated from Russia.

Europe is the region in the world with the most international traffic and cross-border air connectivity. On average, more than 30,000 planes with 7.1 million passengers cross the skies of the Old Continent every day, although that figure is not representative of a weekday in November. For the moment, the false alerts have had no impact on continental air traffic. But with seven weeks left until Christmas, its potential to create aerial chaos seems worth considering.