Which airlines avoided Eastern Ukraine overflights
 

Talking about the ones not landing in that country.

They deserve to be mentioned and commended for being willing to pay extra in order to ensure safety at a time when they were still legally allowed to overfly this space.

Please list below and I suggest that we reward these airlines with our money if we ever pay for a flight or recommend an airline for others to fly on.

From this article :
MH17: Malaysia Airlines flies over Syria instead of Ukraine - Telegraph
I don't think I would judge an airline's potential safety solely or even primarily based on these criteria.

This question has already been asked in the SLF section (http://www.pprune.org/passengers-slf...war-zones.html).


In summary.... stupid question. Short of setting up your own airline and flying the plane yourself, you have to trust the airline and its staff. "You pays your money and you takes your chances" ... as they say.... but feel free to come join the debate in SLF.

More like a stupid answer.

Certain airlines avoided the airspace and any chance of tragedy. All at a significant financial cost to themselves.

They deserve to be recognized. It doesn't guarantee any safety but it does say something.

I have heard of two so far although they are unconfirmed....

British Airways

QANTAS

What an absolutely stupid, infantile and ridiculous thread to start.

So what of the airlines that are still flying over Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan?? Currently MOST airlines are still overflying these areas, can you guarantee that the rebels / freedom fighters in these areas don't have access to supplied / captured anti aircraft missiles??

It is all about risk analysis, remember 2 years ago Qantas was severely criticised for grounding the fleet after the South American Volcano ash cloud when all other airlines continued to fly.

Sometimes you get it right, other times evidence subsequently shows that you weren't risk adverse enough.

I agree.
Not every airline has to fly exactly through this airspace, for some it could be a tiny detour for other much larger, so it is like comparing apples to oranges.

Ya pays yer money, and takes yer chances...great question, which airlines avoid these danger spots, and which don't? Why is this so stupid a question? This is the sort of thing which should be publicized in advertising, not the hemlines or ages of F/As (although they ARE of passing interest). Sam

For very obvious reasons !

As Capetonian hinted at, there are a million and one other safety factors to take into account when selecting an airline to fly with. The route the airline takes is only the tip of the iceberg.

Also, routing can be changed on a day by day, hour by hour basis, and as SLF there is bugger all you can do about it.... whatever information you may have made your route decision on may well have changed by the time you are strapped into your seat and at 30,000ft !


Or indeed what of the airlines flying into Israel ? Which airline would you pick JammedStab ? ;)

Don't be a company man - let the public know
 

No, stupid answer.

The public deserve to know who was knowingly flying their aircraft through a war zone with surface to air missiles. Half a dozen aircraft were shot down before MH17 - there is no hindsight involved here.

Neither would I - but its a good place to start. Some operators took a gamble over East Ukraine and should pay a price - not just Malaysian.

The public can then "pay their money and take their choice" with somebody else next time, should they choose. The question will get more response from pilots here, not on SLF.

In what respect is this thread either Rumours or News?

Suggest it be transferred to SLF.

Correction, those aircraft that were shot down PRIOR to MH17 were shot down with 'standard' surface to air missiles that had a top ceiling of just above 20,000ft. MH017 was unfortunately the incident that proved the rebels had been equipped or had captured more capable weaponary.

Once again, airliners are flying every minute of the day over areas of the globe where aircraft are being 'shot down' at low to medium levels. In these cases the airlines will still transit as there is no evidence of BAK style weapons being deployed there.

Well, rumors or at least speculation as to why some airlines decided is was not a threat.

I would be very curious to know why LH and LX made the switch only now. A LH spokesman was quoted on Friday saying that the detour had minimal cost and time impact, and LH have a history of implementing extra safety procedures or equipment at extra cost long before they become mandatory if risk assessment shows a safety benefit. So was their internal risk management team fast asleep? Did they not receive foreign ministry assessments of the safety situation or listen to what the Americans were recommending? After all, Air Berlin, which is in economic dire straits, decided to do the right thing some time ago, and while they have a decent incident record, they are not known to be pro-active on the safety front.

Ollie, no offence but that is naive.

Wars with fast jets involved are not nicely compartmentalised above and below 20,000 ft. Wars are messy and confused and things change rapidly - notice how the rebels did not issue a NOTAM saying they'd just acquired some fantastic new russian kit. And even if you were safe above 20,000 - what happens when you depressurise and dive down to 10,000? I hope you wouldn't fly over a mountain range thinking 'oh that wont happen anyway - not an issue'

Don't you see - its precisely that kind of 'risk assessment' which has got the industry to where it now stands?

The Americans (the FAA) made the correct call. They had more intelligence data than anyone and were worth listening to.

It's not a stupid question at all. It's a good indicator as to which take safety seriously. Malaysian decided that it wasn't a threat when others did. Why? Was it cost, or had they just not considered flying over a warzone was a threat? Either way, it was an error which may finish the airline.

Dan

I suspect the latter and I agree that it will finish them.

No-one in their right mind would be filing a flight plan that took them anywhere near eastern Ukraine. Vodka and missile launchers are a deadly combination from ground level to FL 600. Its not as if there were not very public reports of aircraft being downed in that area in recent weeks.

Not at all a stupid question. We are talking safety here. After MH 17 there must quite a lot of bearded guys in the ME region enquiring about the BUK systems price/ training required etc. And the sad part there will be willing sellers from the underworld delivering it to them . Then what do you do ? Close down all flights in the region. Its not so simple as it looks.

ek ai sq tk and tg were all flying the exact
same route on THAT day. more airlines than not continued to fly that route so....

It's a load of ignorant crap suited only to after-the-fact experts and tabloid journalists.

Find a route from Asia to Europe that DOESN'T cross a war zone, they virtually all fly across Pakistan / Afghanistan for a start. And yes I know the baddies in those regions "allegedly" don't have high altitude capable SAMs. According to "current intelligence estimates". Yet.

I bet after this week's news though, and the fact that a bunch of ragtag rebels managed to get their hands on this kind of weaponry, the Taliban will be pricking their ears up and putting out a few feelers asking how much to buy that?

What the Taliban DO have that the ukrainian rebels don't of course, is the actual burning desire to shoot down civilian airliners, they'd love nothing better. Unlike the Russian separatists who, it seems, just made a bad mistake, and Putin will be highly unlikely to give them the weaponry to do it again.

Want to avoid that route and travel further south, then you have to choose between Iran, Iraq or Syria.

Airlines don't have in house military threat assessment units, we rely on government intelligence agencies to assess the threats and pass the information on to the relevant national bodies, who will issue NOTAMs and / or airspace closures as they see fit.

If the rest of the world could all agree that the Americans have the biggest and best intelligence agencies, and we should all follow their lead when it comes to issuing warnings about this kind of stuff, then maybe the world would be a safer place. But politics doesn't work like that, and also there's the fact that American airlines are at a higher terrorist risk than Asian ones in general.

It's ridiculous to pick on individual airlines when you have no idea what information they did or didn't have access to, on a given day.

It is a stupid argument to say aircraft fly over war-zones all the time. They don't fly over war-zones where the belligerents have both the capability of bringing down a commercial aircraft at cruising altitude, and where they lack the technical competence or basic command control structure to guarantee safety to civilian aircraft. I've seen articles dated 29th June were the rebels already claimed to have captured and to have the capability of firing an SA-11. If so, the airspace should have been closed immediately, and failing that, the airline risk assessment should have re-routed aircraft.

For anyone who has flown into Kabul recently, they will know that the aircraft are stacked and perform approaches so as to minimize the chance of being attacked with a manpad (shoulder launched rocket). If the capability or intentions of belligerents change, all aircraft risk assessment should change immediately rather than wait for the next monthly update. That it was not seemingly done in this case amounts to negligence.

Disingenuous of QF that they say they are not flying over Ukraine for some months. Since their capitulation to EK, they haven't flown a route that would take them within miles of Ukraine, unless blown incredibly off course. Iraq now.......?

The information was out there. Other airlines acted on it.

Speaking as someone who works in the safety department of one of the airlines which chose not to fly over this region, I would say that a pro-active safety culture can generate the foresight required to mitigate the threat of being shot down over a war zone.

Thank you Dan. I must say, I do wonder if some of those ranting as part of the "stupid question to ask club" could be ones who were part of the decision-makers of the "willing to fly over and take a chance club". Or are they defending a company they work for that chose to do so. Perhaps it hit a little closer to home for me as I know some people(pax) that were very close to the action that day. One a good friend.

Based on this thread and subject to corrections, I would like to add another airline taking the time to analyze, willing to spend more diverting around, and reducing the threat of Ukraine to nil....and especially to those decision-makers.

Cathay Pacific

Congratulations.

Luke ST - you’re letting the airlines off the hook far too easily. I don’t know why.

They have a duty of care to their passengers and crew and the buck stops there. Nobody forces them to fly into or through war zones.

Saying, as some airlines have, that ‘it was legal because the airspace was open’ is crazy. Its legal for me to jump off a cliff, but I wouldn’t do it. When the lawsuits begin we will find out whether it was legal or not.

Passengers want to travel with an airline that takes a conservative approach to safety. That includes being proactive and thinking about military risks and taking the right advice. Your and others assertion that this is tabloid stuff is almost like saying passengers are too stupid to understand or care – that is not the case, its just that they don’t have the information..

Tough choice to avoid area when a fly around wil add approx $18000 to the flight and especially when told you are safe above F320 was it? Would be a good safety culture to fly around after that. Of course $18000 is nothing after what happened.

Question for me is why did they give the seperatists that kind of weapon if you are trying to knock down AN26's, even a Ukranian SU27 would surely fly much lower to strike ground targets? Russia needs to face music for giving that kind of system to those vodka swillers, recipe for disaster.

Russia supplying tons of deadly weaponry to rebels/terrorists/seperatists (whatever), I'm sure there are a couple of Rhodesians sitting around their scooners in a Aussie pub saying "now where have we heard of that before?"

...and BA and AF.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...97.mobile.html

By the result, this question is substantive.


I suspect it cuts to the culture of MH and the other carriers in the region at the time. To suggest it is just "bad luck" is naïve.


If you cant plan to fly over any region at 10000' due a risk of being shot down ... then you shouldn't be over that region at all ....

Moderators, please can this thread be moved to SLF or removed completely?

Not only is it on the wrong forum, but its deliberately "leading the witness" title is an example of inflamatory, wise-after-the-event finger pointing of the worst order.

Let the blame for this truly horrific event lie were it really belongs.

afootsoldier in your previous post you said
which I agree with. No system of NOTAMs or government warnings is foolproof either. All I'm saying is that try as I might I can't think of a route between Asia and Europe even now, that has zero overflight risk.

I'm not letting anyone off the hook I'm saying that with silly threads like this, all it does is put all the airlines who chose to fly that airway, into an impossible corner, before any of the facts are even known.

We don't even know yet with 100% certainty which country shot the missile, let alone the exact circumstances involved with how it came to be fired. It literally might have been a bunch of vodka drinking idiot soldiers playing with their new toys. Sounds unbelievable, but then again who would have thought that a captain of a cruise ship would plow onto the rocks trying to show off to his girlfriend? We just don't know enough yet to start naming and shaming airlines that's all.

Assuming however, what seems most likely, that the shootdown was a terrible mistake of some kind, as opposed to a deliberate attack on civilians, how on earth do you quantify the "risk" of that happening? Must be billions to one surely.

Case in point - I flew out of Seoul this very morning. Within a few short miles of that runway is a border that is absolutely bristling with 1970s era Soviet surface-to-air missiles and, by all accounts, a bunch of illiterate, poorly trained, fanatical North Korean soldiers sitting behind them ready to pull the triggers. But presumably we trust them not to, otherwise no airline would fly into the place right?

Surely the fact that the military hardware exists along such-and-such a route, is not on its own a reason to close it, otherwise most of the world would be closed?

Per Aspera..

You imply that the Russians "gave" the rebels their BUK system. Although it is still conjecture, there are good reasons for thinking that they actually "liberated" it from a Ukraine Army base. This was claimed some days before the MH17 incident.

If the system was acquired in this way, it would be less likely to come with training than if the Russians supplied it.

Playing with the great circle mapper for various Asian hubs to central Europe, the decision to avoid Ukraine was much easier for Cathay to make than for Singapore or Malaysian, since the Hong Kong to say Frankfurt circle does not even touch Ukraine.

If you want to avoid Syria, Ukraine and Iraq altogether, that means flying s-shaped paths for many city pairs. This is particularly true for Gulf based airlines.

Central Europe to NRT seems pretty safe. However, I can remember a FRA-NRT ANA flight taking a detour a few years ago because the North Koreans were testing missiles.

It doesn't just belong with the man who pulled the trigger if nobody forced you to overfly the country. If you don't play Russian Roulette in the first place there wont be a problem.


Re: being wise after the event. You're right - some airlines are now wise after the event. But some were wise before and avoided the trouble spot, as a matter of company, or FAA policy. As a future passenger, i would love to know who they are - is that unreasonable?


Luke ST - I take your point that these things are not totally black and white and some things are truly unforeseeable. In North Korea there's no actual air to air / ground to air war right now, although the weapons are there - flying near their border doesn't seem unreasonable. Ukraine was hot as hell though...

Unfortunate that some have taken to aggressive comments above because I believe this is a serious and significant matter for discussion.

Some carriers, eg BA, Air France, etc, had made a risk assessment of the situation and were not using routes over the area which they had hitherto done. Others had not done this. When just about every PR statement coming out of corporate head offices starts off with "safety and security is our first concern" we are right to question why some had analysed the position and taken this decision whereas others had done nothing about it.

The airspace over Eastern Ukraine was closed up to 30,000 feet due to war risk, and Malaysian's (and others) flight planning and cost control accountants were happy to accept a routing at 31,000 feet. That's just 300 metres away from a war zone. BA, Air France, etc seem to have decided to keep away by some hundred miles or more. I think it is quite reasonable to ask what part of Malaysian's "safety and security is our first concern" led to this decision, and to subject their risk assessment to scrutiny as part of the accident investigation.

I think we also need to ask MH, having accepted this routing, what procedures they had in place to handle an engine failure, a pressurisation failure, or similar which might require an involuntary descent from the assigned level.

I am aware that there have been (and still are) comparable issues when transiting Afghanistan and similar. I am also aware that very extensive assessments were done of the situation there, regularly reassessed, and there are specific procedures in place to handle any of these events I have just described happening to an overflight there. As far as I am aware none of these procedures had been put in place for any transits of Ukraine.

Now why did KLM and AF decide differently even if they are the same company? Because they have retained separate risk management teams or because their pain level was different, as a results of their routes?

Pleading ignorance is no excuse.
Try that approach when you, as a pilot, get questioned by airline management over some misadventure..

The bottom line is - the airlines who were still flying there, despite everything, were comfortable rolling the dice

Tim Clark the boss of Emirates made some interesting points in an interview yesterday, about this very thing, while he was calling for a high level summit involving ICAO / IATA, airlines and government to sort out a new system of airspace management, to avoid the possibility of this tragedy happening again.

The whole interview is at Emirates calls for airlines summit on 'outrageous' MH17 attack | Reuters

There were a whole range; the closure of Ukrainian airspace all the way up to 30,000 feet is more than a bit of a clue.

I really doubt that anyone set out to deliberately attack a Malaysian aircraft. More a case of too-powerful toys getting into the wrong hands, who thought that the only aircraft up there were Ukrainian military. It seems the weapons themselves were likely stolen Ukrainian ones, given that both sides have pretty much the same Soviet-era military hardware, with operators who were effectively amateurs.


But all this was known and in the public arena. It was known the missiles had been stolen. It was known that the dissidents have many with substantial military background (ironically, in the Ukrainian military) who might well have been trained on them. It was known that there were NOTAMs out closing many of the routes across the area. It was known that the 30,000 feet closure was in force, and why. And finally, it was known that some better-informed carriers had decided to stay well away, on learning all of this.

Not for all of Asia: to/from Hong Kong and points further north it's usually a much northerly route passing north of Moscow.


Is it because they're separate carriers owned by the same holding company, similar to BA/IB in IAG?

Yes, the statement is for PR - the Malaysian event could easily have involved another carrier, except the ones who stopped flying there.

Everyone is looking at the airlines who kept flying over East Ukraine and thinking - what on earth were you playing at? So he's trying to regain the initiative and show leadership while deflecting public scrutiny towards ICAO/IATA and away from commercial people who run airlines.

It couldn't be more obvious who is leading and who is following though

I'll come in a little harder.

Carriers who have a good background in worldwide operations and understand what "Risk Asessment" really means seem to have been the ones to make their own decision to route away.


From past experience on this exact routing, there are carriers who route around poor weather etc (and this can be seen on the in-flight map), and those who just plough on straight and put the seat belt sign on. Notably there is a correlation between those who take this second approach and those who were still routing over Eastern Ukraine.


That's a ludicrous overstatement. For the 275 pax on board that's an extra $66 cost each. Given the prevailing fare levels on AMS-KUL that's about 20% of the typical one-way fare. Costs of taking a parallel airway with a 5-10 minute penalty on a 14 hour flight would be nothing like that.


That was never said. It was that up to FL300 was closed due to military threat. A world of difference.