19 Evacuated in Bomb Scare Austrian Airlines Flight to Detour to Bulgaria from Tel Aviv

A bomb threat led Bulgarian authorities and the company to divert an Austrian Airlines flight from Tel Aviv to Vienna to Bulgaria on Sunday.

The crew of the Austrian Airlines flight chose to make an emergency landing in Sofia after allegedly receiving a bomb threat while approaching Romania, Bulgaria’s transport ministry stated in a statement and added that the passengers were removed from the plane after landing.

The transport ministry said standard protocol required the Bulgarian air force to scramble a MiG-29 fighter jet to escort the plane. The airline told AFP that 51 passengers and six personnel were aboard the flight, and a security search of the Airbus A320 began when it landed safely in Sofia about half an hour after the threat.

Flightradar24 data showed the plane, registered as OE-LZE, entered Romanian airspace at about 9:10pm, then turned south and flew back toward Bulgaria, where it landed in Sofia.

Around the same time, the plane was also broadcasting a squawk code of 7700 a general emergency alert, data from another flight-tracking website, ADS-B Exchange, showed.

The Ministry of Transport has formed a crisis response team, and competent authorities have launched an investigation into the incident.

In a separate incident late last month, the co-pilot of a flydubai flight to Tel Aviv from Dubai attacked the captain and was said to have attempted to deliberately crash the plane but was thwarted by the captain, passengers and crew.

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