A friend is taking SU107 from LAX to SVO today, and I’m tracking it on FlightAware. Much to my surprise, the indicated flight path turns right (maybe 30 degrees?) over the North Sea, grazing Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, then over the Baltic Sea continuing over all of Poland, into Ukraine, and then a 90-degree turn left, taking it over Ukraine, Belarus, and finally Russia into Moscow.
This would seem (from eyeballing Google Earth) to add about 500 miles to the great circle route. In fact, FlightAware says that the “planned” distance is 7,185 miles, compared to “direct” of 6,070 miles.
What gives? Was there ever any public announcement?
If you look at your first image, you will see a dashed line that leads to the southwest corner of the Ukraine, where it makes a 90-degree turn left and heads for Moscow. That was all I could see when I wrote my original post, because the flight track actually flown into Moscow didn’t exist yet.
Kiev imposed sanctions on several Russian airlines, including the largest, Aeroflot, due to its continued flights to Crimea, which Ukraine does not recognize as part of Russia. In response, Moscow banned five Ukrainian airlines from carrying out flights to Russia. Ukraine upped the ante by banning all air travel with Russia in October 2015. A month later, Kiev completely closed its airspace to Russian aircraft.
That dotted flight path looked like the initial flight course was assumed to making a stop in Ukraine (cannot tell at this zoom level, looked like Lviv).
Obviously that’s not possible anymore, the actual flight was a non-stop to Moscow.
