- An Azerbaijan Airlines flight crashed after sustaining damage over Russia, killing 38.
- The plane was likely hit by Russian air defense before the crash, BI reported Thursday.
- Several airlines, including Azerbaijan Airlines, El Al, Flydubai, and Qazaq Air, are canceling flights to Russia, citing passenger safety and risks.
Why were they not already avoiding it? This isn’t the first time that a passenger plane was shot down flying in or near a war zone. Hell, it’s not even the first time Russia shot one down over Ukraine. Commercial flights really should stay away from war zones.
Emirates flying from Dubai to Houston takes the yolo route and flys straight north into Iran and over Russia. That was a tense return flight for me.
pretty sure it won’t be an emirates flight getting shot. The UAE are pretty strong supporters of Russia.
Conversely, Azerbaijan is rather friendly with Ukraine.
I flew Turkish from Istanbul to Muscat (was supposed to be from Frankfurt but missed our connection) (edit: how did I forget to mention that we flew over much of IRAN?!?). I was pretty chill about it, even fascinated to be flying over this country full of history and conflict of my own, but chose not to tell my wife until we landed.
That was also in 2019. While I wouldn’t worry much about flying that route again, the world was a bit of a different place then.
Yup, flew to the Philippines a few weeks ago from JFK straight through Russia and China. For some reason there’s never any WiFi on that flight, but there is on the return flight which goes straight east from Manila over the pacific to JFK 🧐
And its not like airliners need to do a whole lot of work routing aircraft around them. Just use the old routes from when the Soviets were kicking and you should mostly be right. China has made a bit more rules since then, but I think they are really the only other major country with weird restrictive airspace.
News outlets need to stop calling it a fucking CRASH when we can see the fucking holes in the plane.
The audacity of saying “reason of crash are unclear, it might have been a bird strike” when the camera panned on the holes…
With their history of “bird strikes” I can see why.
If that one advert is to believed, even Santa Claus got shot down flying over Russian space.
And that was days before this needless tragedy.
Maybe don’t fly near conflict areas, regardless who’s side you’re on.
