SOFIA — Fifty-one passengers, among them a delegation of young people due to speak at the United Nations, were taken off an Austrian Airlines jet in Sofia on Sunday night after a bomb threat sent a Bulgarian fighter up to escort it down.
Flight OS82, an Airbus A320 flying from Tel Aviv to Vienna with six crew, landed at 8:42 p.m. Central European Summer Time (2:42 p.m. ET), the Lufthansa Group said in a statement quoted by Ynet. By TEH’s arithmetic that is 57 people aboard. The diversion came as Bulgaria presses NATO for jets to cover the Black Sea.
What triggered it is the open question. Ynet reported that the threat came from an Austrian citizen who was not aboard, and that early indications pointed to a false alarm. Even so, the machinery ran in full: a fighter scramble, an evacuation, a working headquarters and a check of the aircraft.
Bulgaria’s Transport Ministry said the crew reported the threat at the Romanian border and chose to land in Sofia, and that under procedure an Air Force fighter took off and escorted the plane in. Ynet reported that passengers had been told of an “anonymous report of a bomb on the plane,” which sits awkwardly with a caller identified as Austrian. TEH could not reconcile the two descriptions.
The Transport Ministry’s statement spoke of one fighter. Anadolu Agency reported that Bulgaria’s Defence Ministry said MiG-29 jets were scrambled, in an operation coordinated with NATO’s Combined Air Operations Centre in Spain. The Defence Ministry’s own news page carried no statement on the flight when TEH checked at 03:15 GMT on Monday, so the number of aircraft is unresolved. Earlier that day, NATO jets had tracked a suspected drone over Lithuania.
Bulgaria had rehearsed a similar sequence twelve days earlier. On October 6 its Defence Ministry reported the Blue Bridge 2026 drill with Romania, in which Romanian F-16s handed a Spartan transport playing a stray aircraft to a pair of Bulgarian MiG-29s, which forced it to land at Graf Ignatievo. Anadolu Agency also recalled a similar scare last Tuesday, when a Delta Air Lines flight from New York landed at Ben Gurion Airport after an anonymous warning that checks later found false.
Authorities had not said what the search in Sofia found, who made the call, or whether prosecutors in Austria or Bulgaria have opened a case. The airline said passengers would be rebooked once the checks ended. For now the record holds a fighter escort, an evacuated aircraft and a caller no one has named.
