War in Ukraine and closed skies, how routes change
With the decision taken yesterday by the governments of European Union member states and the immediate reaction of Russia, a [...]
Lufthansa
Finnair
British Airways
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With the decision taken yesterday by the governments of European Union member states. and Russia's immediate reaction, a search by airlines for alternative routes to travel east was triggered.
The carriers most affected are those in northern Europe in routes to Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia, and vice versa.
Finnair's slogan has always been the promise to fly eastward by taking advantage of the shortest possible route; to understand what that means, one only has to compare the two routes held by the A350, the Finnish carrier's flagship flight to Bangkok in the past two days.
This is the route of flight AY 141 yesterday, Feb. 27., a longer journey of about 60 minutes.
As can be seen, a more natural route was the one used until the day before.
Many carriers canceled almost all flights, but in some cases, as was the case with Lufthansa, planes were already flying over Russia's airspace when the overflight ban was issued, so they were forced to turn around and return to Munich and Frankfurt.
British Airwyas canceled direct flights to Japan, while for Singapore and other destinations in that area, flights no longer pass over Russia or Ukraine.
In this image taken from Flightrada24, a site that specializes in tracking all movement in the skies, you can see the route taken by the flight that left London yesterday and headed for the capital of Thailand. Over Afghanistan there is no overflight ban, but in fact since the Taliban regained power airlines around the world have been avoiding crossing the country's airspace.
Japan has also decided to support measures against Russia, now it must be seen whether Russia will also impose the same restrictions here by closing its airspace to Japanese carriers. In this case virtually all routes from Japan to the old continent will be impacted.
Obviously the main problems are for the Russian companies, especially Aeroflot the flag carrier and S7 the main lowcost carrier.
Above is an Aeroflot flight that took off from Belgrade and headed to Moscow, instead of the usual 2 1/2 hours and a route over European skies, the flight took over 5 hours passing over Kazakhstan.
Some Aeroflot aircraft, and their crews, are stranded unable to take off due to bans imposed by individual governments. Again, some planes in the air turned around and landed in Moscow.
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