Europe needs a more coordinated approach to security and a dedicated body to lead the response to bomb threats, the chief executive of Hungarian budget airline Wizz Air said on Thursday, after a wave of hoax alerts disrupted flights, schools and newsrooms across the continent.

Jozsef Varadi said on a post-earnings call that he had recently met the European Commission in person to press officials to act together. "I personally had a meeting with the European Commission very recently, trying to address this issue and urging these people to act together and find ways of getting coordinated," he said.

Wizz Air received hoax bomb alerts for 14 of its flights across Europe last week and had to divert two aircraft as a result. The threats were sent by email to airports and airlines. More than 50 flights across Europe were hit by similar threats last week, according to the Financial Times, including services operated by Wizz Air and Aer Lingus in countries from Poland to Italy.

No European process, says airline boss

Varadi told the Financial Times there was no effective European process for dealing with such incidents, because national security remains a matter for individual states even though the threats cross borders. "There is no European process to deal with a situation like this," he said, adding that Europe needed to consider how to raise its response to a continental level.

In a separate interview with Reuters, Varadi linked the threats to what he described as hybrid warfare affecting the whole of Europe. Reuters said it had not been able to establish the identity of the sender, the origin of the emails, or whether the threats all came from the same source.

European airports have echoed the call. ACI Europe, the airports' trade body, has published a security strategy paper and urged closer cooperation between authorities. Its director general, Olivier Jankovec, said airports could not confront threats of this nature alone and that security rules and cooperation mechanisms needed to be reconsidered.

Disruption continues into this week

Bomb threats have disrupted travel, newsrooms and schools across Europe during November, and the latest alert temporarily disrupted train services in northern France on Thursday morning.

Wizz Air also reported a sharp fall in profit alongside the security warning, with net profit for the six months to September down 66 per cent to 108.1 million euros as fuel costs rose by about a third, according to the Financial Times.