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4 min read . Updated: 25 May 2021, 11:10 PM IST The forced diversion of a Ryanair Holdings PLC flight over Belarus threatens to undermine a set of safety procedures built up over decades between commercial airlines and the governments and militaries of countries they fly over, pilots and air-safety officials say.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Sunday scrambled a jet fighter that escorted the Ryanair commercial aircraft to Minsk as it was passing through Belarus airspace. Belarus said it did so because of suspicion that explosives were on board.
Authorities there then arrested a prominent journalist and opposition activist onboard, before allowing the plane to continue its journey. The incident has sparked an international outcry and raised questions over the legality of the plane’s grounding and the ramifications for the airline industry.
The European Union, the U.K., Ukraine and Lithuania banned their own airlines from flying over Belarus. Approximately 3,000 flights each week transit Belarus, according to aircraft tracking firm Flightradar24.
The move to avoid the country adds to restrictions already in place in the east of Ukraine following the downing of a Malaysia Airlines jet in 2014. While not presenting a major detour for most airlines, rerouting adds time and additional fuel expenses to flights predominantly between Europe and Southeast Asia.
British Airways’ flight from London to Kuala Lumpur, for example, without any restrictions, would fly directly over eastern Ukraine. The flight has been using Belarus airspace instead, before turning south toward the Malaysian capital. With the new restrictions, the airline now will need to fly farther north, taking a south turn over Russia.
On Monday, Belarusian transport authorities said Gaza’s governing militant group, Hamas, had sent an email to Minsk National Airport saying a bomb would explode on the Ryanair flight unless Israel ceased hostilities in the Gaza Strip, a claim that was dismissed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel as “completely implausible." Gaza authorities didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Aviation experts say that if Belarus made up the bomb threat and intercepted the jetliner to apprehend the dissident, it would undermine the Chicago Convention, signed in 1944, which restricts the use of military force against civilian aircraft in most cases. Industry executives and aviation-safety officials said they couldn’t remember a recent precedent involving a commercial jetliner.
“We’re in uncharted territory," said Conor Nolan, chairman of the board of governors of the Virginia-based Flight Safety Foundation, which advocates for air safety. “If we lose confidence in the ability to safely fly over states, it’s going to significantly damage trust in international commercial aviation." He and others called for a comprehensive probe into what happened.
Bomb threats are one of a commercial airline pilot’s most difficult challenges, and airlines and aviation regulators have spent years crafting protocols for handling them. Those procedures, encompassing how to authenticate and communicate a threat and what actions to take once one is thought to be real, are largely kept from public view, to discourage potential bad actors from exploiting or evading them.
But officials say they are built on trust between cockpit crew and authorities. If the Ryanair diversion is shown to be a ruse, that trust could erode not just over Belarus, but around the world.
“This unprecedented act of unlawful interference will potentially upend all the assumptions about the safest response to bomb threats on flight and interceptions," the International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations said in a statement.
A fundamental tenet of bomb-threat response is to land the aircraft at the nearest safe airport, pilots say. In the case of the Ryanair diversion, the jetliner turned around and headed for Minsk, Belarus’s capital, when it was already close to the border with Lithuania, according to flight-tracking data. According to Eurocontrol, which manages air-traffic controllers across Europe, Vilnius in Lithuania, the flight’s original destination, would have been the operative airport to approach.
Ryanair’s cockpit crew had little room to maneuver, pilots and aviation industry officials said. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on planes that crashed in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, governments have increasingly felt they can assume a jetliner is a direct threat if it fails to respond to directions, and they can order military action to prevent calamity.
“Let’s be under no illusion, if there is a fighter jet off your wingtip clearly indicating instructions, the pilot of the commercial air transport aircraft has little option but to follow those instructions," Mr. Nolan said.
The Belarus interception isn’t without some parallels. Russia’s government has dismissed the criticism against its ally Belarus, citing a 2013 incident in which Bolivia’s presidential plane, suspected of carrying former U.S. intelligence officer Edward Snowden, was prevented from entering France and Portugal airspace en route back to Bolivia from Moscow. It was forced to land in Vienna, where the aircraft was searched. That incident involved a government operated aircraft, though, not a commercial airline.
In 1985, the U.S. intercepted an EgyptAir passenger jet that was transporting four men who had orchestrated the hijacking of an Italian cruise ship. The flight, which had requested permission to land in Tunis, Tunisia, was instructed by American military jets to divert to a naval air station in Sicily, where the men were arrested.
This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.
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