Flight from Austria to Israel makes emergency landing due to bomb threat

A flight from Tel Aviv, Israel, was forced to make an emergency landing on Sunday evening due a bomb threat.

The Airbus A320 had been travelling to Vienna, Austria, with 51 passengers and six crew members on board, but had to land in Sofia, Bulgaria, instead, Bulgarian authorities said.

A crew member reported receiving the threat, and an air force fighter jet escorted the plane until it landed, Bulgarian state television said.

The broadcaster said the incident was being investigated.

Flight tracking site FlightAware showed an Austrian Airlines flight left Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv on Sunday at 6:46pm local time and landed around three hours later at Vasil Levski airport in Sofia.

It has since landed safely in Vienna, after departing from Sofia in the early hours of Monday morning.

The incident comes just weeks after a Flydubai pilot attempted to hijack an aircraft while flying between the United Arab Emirates and Israel on September 30.

The co-pilot, an Omani national, had intended to seize control of the airplane and fly it into the passenger terminal at Israel’s main international airport, authorities in the United Arab Emirates said.

Passengers and crew managed to intervene and stabilise the plane during flight, which was diverted to an airport in Saudi Arabia. Most of those onboard were from Israel.

The chaos unfolded less than three hours after the flight left Dubai, with a fight breaking out in the cockpit, causing the plane to plummet from 33,000 to 17,000 feet in about a minute.