It should be considered and questioned, but it may not be nefarious.
Why are you straining so hard to give this criminal act plausible deniability?
You can easily look up the track of the aircraft. There is no "tailwind" that would have made Minsk the shorter flight.
Im not a pilot, much less a pilot in that part of the world. But I do know that planes are generally only talking to 1 ATC at a time and it takes time to get in touch with another. And that pilots have very specific checklists and procedures when needing to call emergency landings. Listen to the Sully recordings when he ditched in an emergency. NJ was closer but he was still in contact and it would have taken too long.
So if they get called for an emergency and are forced to make a landing, there are protocols in place to swiftly determine the when, where etc of setting down.
Unless you are going to make the accusation that the pilots are political agents/operatives...
He was _talking_ to NY TRACON. That doesn't mean he was somehow required to land in NY, not NJ. His first request to ATC was whether he could land at Teterboro (in NJ). They got on the phone and got permission for him, in order to avoid having to switch frequencies.
> So if they get called for an emergency and are forced to make a landing, there are protocols in place to swiftly determine the when, where etc of setting down.
Indeed there are, and literally none of them have to do with which ATC center the pilot happens to be communicating with at that point.
> Unless you are going to make the accusation that the pilots are political agents/operatives...
The pilots were looking at a MiG-29 out their window. They did not have a choice in the matter.
Europe consistenly gets the highest ranking in things that test for different aspects of freedom (democracy, press, police violence, etc.)
To be clear: it's not that Europe can't do better, but if you care about 'freedom' it's a better place to be than pretty much any other region on the planet.
Only that I have doubts that the pilots did NOT follow the proper protocols or were somehow involved in a conspiracy here. Commercial aviation is one of the few jobs where theres little tolerance for deviation of established protocols and checklists, especially in declared emergencies. And a lot of the routing decisions arent necessarily made by them.
I understand some may find that offensive.. But it doesn't change my view on the matter. Nonetheless, i dont really see what is so controversial about stating it. It doesn't really excuse anything here....
Other interesting tidbit, the person claimed to be fine about 30 minutes later after talking to 2 doctors. But the ground crew said they required people to go to the hospital now for a full eval.
I see, so if you want an expedited landing you need to convince one of the other passengers on the plane to fake a heart attack.
