Originally Posted by
ATNotts
I'm sure nothing sinister, but I have noticed that Air Bridge 747-8s almost always arrive in EMA from Krasnoyarsk crossing the Yorkshire coast then heading across Sheffield and then approaching EMA from the north. I assumed that this is just logical based on great circle routings. But then yesterday Volga Dnepr AN124 RA-82074 was inbound from Leipzig and took a similar routing, which for flights between LEJ and EMA did appear very odd, since the very regular DHL and Kallita flights on this route pretty well always approach from the southeast or east. I'd had thought that if there was some operational or economic reason to make landfall to the north of EMA then all the carriers would look to use that routing.
In these troubled times one does wonder, but equally one wonders what they'd expect to be looking for if there was anything untoward going on - and if the UK did have anything to hide why they'd allow such routing from (potentially) hostile nations commercial aircraft.
If I wanted to do something sinister with a Russian airliner, I would not necessarily start with an airline that has a large number of foreign pilots, including British and U.S., and flies regularly to both these countries. ABC has hubs in Atlanta and Chicago.