Originally Posted by
Capt Fathom
The great circle route from Sydney to London goes vey near to HongKong, through China and then Russia and the Baltic Sea.
Wasn’t this an old Qantas route from Australia to London via HongKong?
Pretty much. Flights on L888 used to go over the Tibetan Plateau, but someone put the kybosh on that (not sure whether it was Chinese authorities or Flight Ops suddenly got antsy about the LSALTs.)
After that flights used to follow the route from Chengdu to Lanzhou then a hard left turn to Urumqi and into Kazakhstan before entering Russian airspace. That’s clearly not going to happen for some time.