I’m aware there appears to be a pay wall in place to find this stuff but my reason for wanting it would, I guess, pose more of a security issue than a personal one, or both I guess. It’s just I don’t want to push any alarm bells without due reason. However, I have found what happened to be disturbing enough to at least keep me wondering.
Long story short, a flight I was on in 2014 took what I thought to be an odd route over the middle east at what seemed like quite a low altitude, and it flew at this altitude on and off over most of the middle east. Basically if I said that this airline had recently announced they would no longer be flying over the middle east (well, Iraq), and then not only proceeded to do so, but did so by turning sharply south while over Ankara, you might see my concern.
I have also been looking at typical flight routes for this particular plane and they don’t seem to match the route we took on this occasion.
Also, I should note … TBH I fell asleep around Ankara and woke up as we passed over Baghdad.
I’m going to bump this again because of the current tension with Russia.
It was an Airbus A332 flying from Dublin to Abu-Dhabi on August 25th 2014. I think flight EY48 but I will need to find my travel itinerary to be sure. There are a few planes running the same route.
I abstained on a follow-up to this because I contacted the concerned airports/flight provider and their response was either that they ignored it or said nothing can possibly go wrung.
My main concern also wasn’t just the flight route I mentioned, but that the standard route of these flights clearly go over active war zones - Syria and Iraq which should be off limits anyway. Sometimes they go around and other times they go through Syria … which seems to be sort of a Titanic-style shortcut through a glacier field.
My own experience struck me as an anomaly because I recall being low enough to see fire on the ground. This happened a few months after the disappearance of the Malaysian flight and a few months before the downing of the plane over Russia. This date also coincided with an active military campaign by Isis in Syria and Northern Iraq. It appears to have flown over the most active point of conflict at that time. I raised a recent concern because I noticed in news reports Russia upgraded these regions with the same Buk missile defense which is believed to have shot down the plane over Ukraine. I thought it was alarming back then that they would allow this flight route to remain, but see more concern given the current global tensions. Naturally, it also stood out to me as I used to have a fear of flying at the time and this was my first long-distance flight.
I’m just not sure how they could have justified this flight route at the time, and to this day given what happened to the Iranian plane, insist on flying passenger planes into active warzones. Worse yet is that the plane is coming from a neutral country. Every time a plane is shot down or mysteriously disappears today I can’t help but think of this flight route. To myself, this seems like the exact scenario that is leading to these planes being shot down. It seems like total negligence.
