Bomb threats have caused diversions and emergency landings for at least 15 flights across Europe, renewing questions about a possibly coordinated effort to disrupt travel.

The series of warnings on Thursday morning affected flights between Italy, Ireland, the UK, Spain, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Finland, Austria, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, Greece and Czechia.

On Tuesday seven planes across Europe were searched or diverted after malicious hoax bomb alerts. On Monday a flight from the UK to Bulgaria was diverted after a threat that was apparently without substance.

The latest alerts affected flights by Ryanair, Aer Lingus, Wizz Air, Finnair and LOT. All landed safely. Initial searches of some of the planes found nothing suspicious.

Two Ryanair flights from Copenhagen and Madrid to Sofia made emergency landings in the Bulgarian capital while a Ryanair flight from London to Sofia was diverted and landed at Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second largest city.

A Bulgarian government spokesperson said: “Upon landing, the necessary inspections were carried out in accordance with the applicable procedures and no issues were identified. Airport operations at both Sofia airport and Plovdiv airport have returned to normal.”

An Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to Rome was diverted to the Évreux-Fauville military airbase in northern France. A Wizz Air flight from Milan to Warsaw was diverted to Vienna, while a Ryanair flight from Porto and an Aegean Airlines flight from Thessaloniki, both to Milan, were searched upon arrival at Milan’s Malpensa airport.

Also affected were an LOT Polish Airlines flight from Warsaw to Brussels, two Finnair flights from Helsinki to Rome and Vienna and four flights by other airlines to Prague.

A Czech police spokesperson said: “Security measures at Prague airport have just ended, with pyrotechnic inspections yielding negative results.”

The threats against the Finnair flights were “unfounded or hoax”, said an airline representative. “Unfortunately, air traffic is sometimes subject to threats, as we have seen this week, when also other airlines in Europe have faced hoax bomb threats. Threats are almost always unfounded.”

The travel disruption followed cyber-attacks this week against supermarket refrigeration systems. Some analysts speculate the disruption, along with drone incursions and triggering of app alerts, is part of a hybrid campaign to unsettle Europe on behalf of Iran, Russia or other state actors.

A Kremlin spokesperson said on Thursday it was “absurd” to blame Vladimir Putin’s administration for the hackers who targeted fridges. “We have ​such baseless accusations against our country, implicating it in everything,” Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

Many of the affected flights on Thursday were operated by low-cost carriers but there was little discernible pattern surrounding the incidents.

The Italian news agency Ansa, citing police sources, said the warning for the Helsinki-Rome and Dublin-Rome flights came from an anonymous email written in Italian and sent to the Rome airport company, ADR, and other affiliated companies. The subject heading was “segnalazione minaccia” (“threat warning”).

Aviation experts say fake threats occur daily but that such a number of credible threats, even if malicious hoaxes, appears to point to coordinated action.

Capt Martin Drake, a former airline pilot and technical adviser to the Balpa union, said airlines had security teams who assessed each threat on a traffic-light scale: green to keep going or red to be grounded, with an amber option only for flights yet to take off, allowing tighter checks and searches of the plane before clearing it to fly.

“If you want to deliberately disrupt a flight, then you need to do so once it’s airborne,” said Drake. Pilots have a QRH – a quick response handbook – whose instructions will probably include to descend quickly as well as divert to the nearest airport on receipt of a red alert. At cruising altitude, “aircraft pressurisation would do a lot of the work of any improvised explosive device”.

Diversions are expensive as well as highly disruptive, but airlines have little choice in the face of any remotely credible threat.

The ready availability of airline operations information on the internet means that any hoaxer now has a level of detail about the schedules, the type of plane and its technical specifications that would have eluded all but insiders decades ago.

Rhys Jones, an analyst at Osprey Flight Solutions, an aviation intelligence firm, said the confidence of airlines in European airport security should not mean any change to normal protocols after the hoaxes, but “one of the natural responses will be to see double-downed security, media coverage and public concern about travelling”.

He said the threats seemed linked but “a reasonably chaotic campaign with no particular region targeted”, and while they could weaken future security responses through the normalisation of threats, simply creating disruption could be regarded as a success by those carrying out the hoaxes.

Ministers are seeking to end the “wild west” of parked e-bikes blocking pavements, as they attempt to crack down on antisocial behaviour such as cyclists jumping red lights.

The consultation, led by the Department for Transport, will aim to establish national standards on issues including parking, ending the current patchwork of agreements between individual bike companies and councils.

While some areas enforce rules that mean shared bikes – such as those operated by Lime, Forest and Voi – can only be left in designated parking bays, elsewhere the rules are looser, prompting complaints about bikes blocking pavements, particularly for wheelchair users, people with pushchairs and those with impaired vision.

It will also look at antisocial and illegal riding, for example, people jumping lights or the use of bikes by those who are underage or drunk.

The plans will also examine guidelines for fleet sizes to ensure certain areas are not overcrowded and possible requirements for operators to have insurance, so someone hit by a rider on a hired e-bike can claim compensation.

Another part of the consultation will look at whether councils and mayors should be given powers over the fees charged to rent bikes, and whether companies should share data to improve enforcement and transport planning.

Since arriving in the UK in 2018, shared e-bike systems, of which Lime is by some way the biggest, have expanded rapidly, especially in London. More than 2.6 million Britons used an e-bike share scheme in the year to September 2025, according to one estimate.

There is evidence that shared e-bikes are used by a broader demographic range of riders than traditional bikes, in part because of the electric assistance, but also because they do not require somewhere secure to park.

The DfT argues that the bikes are growing in importance for urban transport, but that the lack of any central oversight has created difficulties, noting that the companies themselves have called for more regulation.

The proposed changes would be “a small but important everyday fix to make our streets safer”, Andy Burnham said. The prime minister added: “E-bikes can make getting around that bit easier, but when they block pavements or are used irresponsibly they can be a real frustration.

“I want to sort that by giving communities more control over where they are parked and making sure companies and riders play by the rules.”

Heidi Alexander, the transport secretary, said: “Shared e-bike schemes have revolutionised the way people travel around our towns and cities. They are easy to use, get us active and help reduce emissions, but we need to make sure they work with the communities where they operate.

“That’s why we are taking decisive action to give local leaders the power to stop nuisance parking, tackle antisocial behaviour and make journeys safer.”

There are parallel efforts in London under which the DfT would devolve power to the mayor, Sadiq Khan, and Transport for London to unify e-bike regulations, which are currently the responsibility of individual boroughs and vary significantly.

Khan said: “The ‘wild west’ approach to dockless e-bikes cannot continue. While these services are helping thousands more Londoners to cycle, their rapid growth has also brought challenges around safety, inconsiderate parking and the lack of data needed to properly manage them.

“I’ve been calling for powers to better manage dockless e-bike schemes since 2017, when the first schemes arrived in London, so I welcome the government’s plans to give cities the powers they need to do this.”

My partner, John Taylor, who has died from cancer aged 74, was a leading figure in the field of community, rural and accessible transport. He made practical improvements in the lives of many people affected by privatisation, poor planning and reduced public funding of transport services.

While volunteering in Manchester in the 1970s John found minimal resources available for those who needed help to access his community buses – makeshift steps and ramps of milk crates and wooden planks were the norm. Plugging this gap became the foundation of his work.

He co-founded Manchester Community Transport (MCT) and in 1984 was founding director of Community Transport Services, later Community Transport Association UK (CTA), the national advisory body for transport-related charities. In the 90s he was instrumental in devising MiDAS (the Minibus Driver Awareness Scheme). In 1994 MiDAS was adopted nationally as a training scheme for volunteer minibus drivers; 30 years later, CTA UK issued its one millionth driver assessment certificate.

Born in Cambridge, John was the youngest of three children of Reginald Taylor, a civil servant, and his wife, Winifred (nee Stamford). The family moved to south London when John was a few weeks old. He was a gifted student at Whitgift school, Croydon, where his love of a challenge and wide open spaces led him to embrace mountaineering and climbing. He subsequently climbed in the UK, the Alps, Pyrenees and Himalayas; his final “big” expedition was an ascent of Ama Dablam, in Nepal, in 2007.

In 1971 he went to New College, Oxford, to study philosophy, politics and economics, followed by a year as an articled clerk in London, with the intention of pursuing a legal career. He then moved to Manchester to do postgraduate study in the sociology of law at Manchester University and stayed in the north for the rest of his life. Voluntary jobs led him into the transport sector, first with MCT and later as a freelance transport consultant, which is when I first met him, working together in Levenshulme.

We moved to Lancaster in 1995, and around this time John became co-director of the TAS (Transport Advisory Service) Partnership. He would often take on far too much and his reports were invariably delivered at the last minute. But once finished, he loved to communicate his ideas; his colourful shirt and tie combos gave him a standout presence during presentations.

Outside work, he enjoyed his vast music collection, which covered classical, jazz, blues and his beloved Grateful Dead. When the children expressed interest in Meccano, he drove to Hampshire to collect a huge quantity bought on eBay.

A loyal fan of Morecambe FC, he was active in the Shrimps Trust supporters’ society, leading the post-match litter-picking team and helping them acquire MiDAS certification for their away travel.

He is survived by me, our sons, Robin and Jonathan, his stepson, Ashley, and his sister, Fran, and brother, Francis.