- 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.
I think the major ones already have been.
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.
If they were going to deliberately target passenger airliners they wouldnt do it over their own soil. This is a major embarrassment that reflects poorly on the quality of their equipment and personnel.
It’s not necessarily some intentional conspiracy, but rather the question of care and communication, etc.
Everyone knows their IFF is dogshit. There’s a surprising regularity to airlines being shot down, even before the war.
A UAE-based airline’s planes are going to be less likely to fall through the cracks, so to speak, than an Azerbaijan-based airline’s
Which is crazy because all those airliners are squawking ADS-B while in the air, it’s not some complicated IFF system like you’d find on a fighter jet. Shit, I can pick up ADS-B when airliners fly over my house with a cheap ass SDR dongle and antenna.
Part of it might also be that sometimes, military or intelligence flights might squawk ads-b with a spoofed signal to blend into the overall traffic.
It isn’t that they didn’t know they were there, it’s that they didn’t believe the ID. It’s not just the hardware that’s the problem. (The hardware is dogshit, but so are the people using it. People are part of the system, too, and they’re fairly poorly trained.)
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 🧐
Go the other way…
Pretty simple poem but I guess it works