172driver wrote:
would you have continued to Vilnius (which was a lot closer anyway) or flown to Minsk? Serious question for the airline pilot.
Not enough infos at this moment. Based only on the message that there is a bomb and where the nearest airport is Vilnius you could declare mayday and proceed there.
There must have been something more behind.
At the end if the capt would disregard ATC “request” to divert to Minsk then Belarus would most probably ban that airline from its airspace and pilots would be fired.
No airline would stand behind its crew where there is a business to loose.
Raven wrote:
At the end if the capt would disregard ATC “request” to divert to Minsk then Belarus would most probably ban that airline from its airspace and pilots would be fired.
No airline would stand behind its crew where there is a business to loose.
I don’t think so and I find this view astonishing.
ATC can’t simply request civil traffic to land where they want. This is a political shitshow aka testing the waters.
Belarus has more damage to fear from losing airline connections than the airline.
Also, pilots cannot be fired for being extorted.
ATC „requests“… to a Captain or a muppet.
Snoopy wrote:
ATC „requests“… to a Captain or a muppet.
Do not criticise. You will be a captain one day as well maybe.
Here is some interesting legal info:
https://www.ejiltalk.org/aerial-incident-of-23-may-2021-belarus-and-the-ryanair-flight-4978/
@dimme got it right
and again
no blame on the crew.
From the IJEL article
We note that interception, in particular, will likely entail a threat of force when undertaken by fighters: the flight commander must comply with instructions of interceptors or risk action against the aircraft.
Snoopy wrote:
Here is some interesting legal info:
Very good blog post. (For those who did not read it in full: The authors show that what happened has nothing to do with “Hijacking” or “State Terrorism” but it was a sovereign country that exercised authority over their airspace. All they did according to the authors was a breach of Chicago and Montreal Convention)
I do not agree to their conclusion according to Montreal convention: It would require that the authorities were “endangering the safety of an aircraft in flight” by passing the wrong information about a bomb. I do not think that a landing at a properly equipped airport at suitable weather establishes “a danger” even if it was unplanned and forced. What happened was a perfectly straight forward standard procedure that is a safe as aviation can be.
So what remains is a breach of Chicago convention. Interestingly (as also the authors point out) there is no defined enforcement or penal mechanism for the Chicago convention. So actually no big deal for Belarus.
The really interesting thing is that rules like the freedom of the air wich are so important to international travel are only codified in a contract that does not even have an enforcement mechanism attached to it. Many people would believe differently…
Malibuflyer wrote:
The authors show that what happened has nothing to do with “Hijacking” or “State Terrorism”
Do we yet have the full picture of what happened on board the aircraft? Apparently there were several KGB agents among the passengers.
Indeed it’s ICAO provision for sovereign state to ask an overflying aircraft to land, in theory there is no need to fudge a whole piece of theatre but ICAO provision lacks legal mechanism to exercise airspace sovereignty or enforce/police the action by the states, this has comme up on the numerous times when civilian aircrafts were diverted or even shot down, so most cases will involve shitshow arguments like “operational mistake”, “right for self defense”, “suspected agression”, “suspected terrorism” rather than exercising my “ICAO rights”…
An interesting read local copy
But it could be the highjack from the inside…
Airborne_Again wrote:
Do we yet have the full picture of what happened on board the aircraft?
The “full picture” we will only have after the movie was released ;-)
Seriously: As to my knowledge there is not a single report that anybody inside of the aircraft exercised force own the pilots or even tried to influence them. Everything we know indicates that the pilots were asked by ATC to divers to Minsk and they complied (rightfully so). So as long as John le Carré does not come up with another version, I guess it is safe to assume that no hijacking has happened,,,
I would consider it unsafe in general to fly over a country I do not want to go. Where would the crew go if there is a technical or medical emergency? I would not fly to Vilnius at all as there is some risk the crew might choose nearby Belarus as an alternate in some scenarios. Finally staying at Vilnius so close to the border is probably a bad idea all together…
