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It’s odd to me that the Ryanair flight yesterday was already closer to its destination of Vilnius than Minsk when it turned around. Ryanair said that the crew
by erentz 5y ago
It’s odd to me that the Ryanair flight yesterday was already closer to its destination of Vilnius than Minsk when it turned around.
Ryanair said that the crew had been "notified by Belarus (Air Traffic Control) of a potential security threat on board and were instructed to divert to the nearest airport, Minsk".
So they didn’t have an incident onboard? There were no hijackers claiming to have a bomb? Just ATC telling them they have a bomb on board? And instead of landing at the nearest airport of Vilnius they turned to take a longer, more indirect route to a further away airport of Minsk?
This would seem obviously suspicious to me. If you have a bomb on board, wouldn’t you want to go to the nearest airport, not the one further away? Wouldn’t you ask why you are being redirected further away? Then wouldn’t the response when you point out you’re closer to Vilnius and for safety want to land there make it clear to you something fishy was up? I would love to hear the radio communications and any communications back to Ryanair operations on this one.
- rraihansaputra 5y agoThat would be the normal procedure, but there is not much to do when the aircraft is pursued and escorted by fighter planes. Any country has jurisdiction over their airspace, including shooting down any non-compliant aircraft.
- csomar 5y agoThey sent a fighter jet. I don't think the pilot had much of a choice.
- toyg 5y agoYeah, this. No civil-aviation pilot is going to argue the fine points of law while in target range of an armed MiG.
- EvilEy3 5y agoWhy is this downvoted?
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoAi have serious doubts that they would date shoot down the plane, but obviously this is such a wild scenario for a normal pilot that they cannot be blamed for not turning it into a game of chicken
- slezyr 5y ago> It’s odd to me that the Ryanair flight yesterday was already closer to its destination of Vilnius than Minsk when it turned around. Closer, but it had the wrong altitude for Vilnius. They were intercepted earlier. See this visualization https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1396482250812841986 https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1396482250812841986
- tomp 5y agoVery interesting! Is there a sensible explanation for this? Have they known up-front that the flight is going to be diverted? Or maybe they were radio-ed before, and there was some discussion / negotiation (during which time, they aborted their descent to Vilnius)...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wasmitnetzen 5y agoA plane slows down in descent to an airport, so my guess would be that they tried to leave Belarusian airspace as fast as possible, but it wasn't fast enough.
- ols 5y agoThis is a published rule of Belorussian airspace. If there is a terrorist threat onboard a plane in it the plane cannot leave the airspace and must land in Belarus. I don’t know if this is a common rule or not. Maybe it was intentionaly established for situations like this?
- amelius 5y agoYou want to fly over uninhabited areas. Distance comes next.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]