Noble said they remained on board for two-and-a-half hours while police and navy personnel carried out checks, including searches with sniffer canines.
The passengers were later advised they would be taken to an airport in Paris and another aircraft would fly them on to Rome.
Philip Baum, professor of aviation security at the University of Coventry, said the industry “faces multiple bomb threats every single day” but he had been “surprised” by this week’s incidents.
A flight is diverted “only when the threat is credible and the authorities believe there is a potential of explosive device on board”, he said.
He said the concern was that “if you issue enough hoax threats, then complacency could set in and a real threat could be ignored – or they could be a diversion”.
Marco Chan, an aviation skilled at Kingston University, advised the BBC the threats were “most likely a hoax, but the system is right to treat it as real”.
He said they were being seen by some specialists as “possibly part of a pattern of cheap, deniable disruption” to air journey.
Hoaxes can also come from copycats, he said, but “three days of incidents is too small a sample to separate coordination from contagion”.
Two days in the past, seven European flights, including two from the UK, were searched after bomb threats were made. No explosives were discovered on any of the planes after searches.
On Monday, a Wizz Air flight travelling from London Luton Airport to Sofia was escorted by a Hungarian fighter jet to Budapest after a mid-air bomb menace.
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