20 Comments

• Greenwald has a point but seems to me to be over egging it a bit. There’s a significant gap between making an up-front refusal for a non-scheduled flight to enter your airspace and allowing in a scheduled flight then causing it to divert under (presumably) false pretences.

  I wonder if there’s any way that the Ryan Air crew could have preserved their side of the conversation in the CVR before their later flight to Vilnius.

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• If I understood the press reports properly, the Ryanair flight was on a scheduled flight and on its proper, authorised flight path. There is no suggestion that it had made an unauthorised deviation from its flight plan prior to the holding as described here, and the subsequent diversion to Minsk.
  There are strange things in the transcript. The request for a holding in Belarus airspace does not really make sense, if I had been the captain I would have preferred to continue as per my flight plan, and if deemed desirable enter a holding over or near the destination. Surely, the aircraft was based in Poland which is an EU country. So is Lithuania. Belarus is controlled by a pro-Putin puppet regime after Lukashenko actually lost the elections, probably by a large margin. It cannot have been unknown to presumably Polish pilots that there have been protests in Belarus that have been suppressed by the authorities, violently so
  That aside, as a former Ryanair captain, albeit in the early days when the company operated if I remember correctly, 10 aircraft, I never heard of a crew who had the company “legal agreements” at hand when deciding to hand over passengers to presumably hostile authorities during a hijack. Which is what allegedly happened.
  The flight, at FL 390, might well have been in radio range of Vilnius. There can be little doubt that the crew had all relevant radio frequencies at hand, including that of their own base ops. No need to ask Belarus ATC for them.
  Last but not least, the crew – according to the transcript in this blog – were very cooperative when it came to accepting a diversion to Minsk.
  If I had been the captain, I would at least have told ATC that I would prefer to continue to my destination. From the first news reports it was clear to me that a diversion to Minsk – not a regular destination – would not have made sense for the reason stated: a bomb alert.
  The transcript does not make any mention of an intercept by fighters. Surely, the crew should have preserved the CVR recordings. I cannot really find any concrete evidence that a MIG 29 had been near the Ryanair flight. On a flight that I once made in Soviet airspace with the Cessna 310 we were told to “climb now to flight level “faif tousant meters”. in those days in Eastern Europe they used metres, not feet. 5000 metres equals15000 feet. When we protested because we were not pressurised and had no oxygen on board , ATC retorted: “You now climb to faif tousant meters or you see MIG – verry close”. ATC made it very clear that, unless I complied, I would be intercepted. The transcript of the ATC conversations with the Ryanair crew makes no mention, no threat, of a possible intercept. I see no mention of a MIG, “Verry close” or not anyway.
  Which makes me suspect that the transcript that Sylvia published here has been heavily “edited” by the Belarus authorities.
  Although there is little evidence that the flight was intercepted by a fighter aircraft, it is the only explanation why the crew complied so readily. And I even suspect that the CVR recordings have been erased on the ground at Minsk – but not by the crew.
  Putin has no doubts about the weakness of the West. He was a KGB man himself who grabbed power, probably for life. Trump was very submissive to him. During a visit of Mrs. Merkel, the German Chancellor, to Moscow, Putin kept a big dog at his side during the conversation. It is known that Angela Merkel is afraid of dogs. Russian missiles shot down a Malaysian Airbus on a scheduled passenger flight over Ukraine. Putin denied all involvement, even though satellite photos showed the mobile launching units on their way back to Russia. Russian agents have poisoned dissidents in other countries.
  The only question is whether or not Lukashenko acted with Putin’s consent. Either way, Putin can as per usual shrug it off.

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• shame that politics has entered this blog

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  • I always find it intriguing how many people only consider something to be political when they disagree with it. This website has often had to deal with political details, especially when an airline from one country has an incident or an accident in another country.

    But why not tell us, in this instance, which bit of the piece above you consider to be “political” as opposed to documenting the details and context around the incident?

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  • The FAA certification for the 737 MAX is plitics. Iran shooting a Ukranian jet out of the sky is poitics. France choosing to believe that Nungesser and Coli made it to Maine is politics so old it’s now called “history”.

    Air travel is often international, and thus by its nature often involves politics; and therefore, so does this blog.

    ‘Fear of Landing’ this weak simply addresses fear of landing in a country where you absolutely don’t want to.

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• Politics have a lot to do with this article. Unavoidably, unfortunately.
  Of course it depends what side you are on. There are still 45+ million Americans who believe in the lie that Joe Biden “stole” the election.
  Without politics, it is unlikely in the extreme that Lukashenko would have remained in office. I don’t even say “won” the election because for all that it is worth, he probably lost by a landslide.
  So without the support of Uncle Vlad there would now be a very different regime in Belarus and the state-sponsored hijack would not have taken place.
  So sorry “Admin user”, politics and this incident are intrinsically interwoven.

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  • Rudy, Biden’s people DID steal the election just as surely as Belarus violated the law by forcing an overflying passenger aircraft to land. I could get into why I believe the first part is true in detail (and it’s rooted in statistics and specific voting patterns) but this is not the place for such a conversation. Let’s make an agreement: you leave the US politics out of the comments and I will as well.

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    • Bring your evidence to metabunk.org and I will reply there. I suggest you do a search first, though, it may already have been discussed there. The statistical claims examined so far have not held water.

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• Absent CVR data, I would assume that the Belarusian CAA’s transcript is an amusing forgery just like the email. (And I’d be picky about CVR data; unless there’s a proper chain of custody, another forgery followed by an overwrite is possible — we’ve had other discussions about recorder data being too volatile to be useful.) I’m less than amused by the claim that there was no fighter plane involved; if not, what caused the pilot, after a couple of minutes’ silence, to declare an emergency? Did he really believe the bomb was sensitive to global location rather than altitude?

  I have seen reports in reputable sources (New York Times, BBC) that Protasevich was nervous over a couple of goons taking many pictures of him in the Athens airport; the Greek citizen could be innocent or could be deep cover, but the Belarusians who deplaned sound very suspect.

  I’ve noticed how most governments are reported as calling this a state hijacking; I’m not sure why they don’t all call it state piracy, given the widespread reports that the plane was approached by a Belarusian fighter.

  Is there any way to identify where “Admin User” was posting from?

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• Chip,
  Yes absolutely, as I stated I agree that it is highly probable that CVR recordings have been erased deliberately, and most probably not by the crew.
  I also indicated that I believe that the Ryanair flight was indeed intercepted and escorted by a MIG fighter plane and forced to divert.
  Minsk was absolutely not the most logical choice for a diversion.
  It is indeed strange that “… the pilot, after a couple of minutes of silence, to declare an emergency?”
  And, I repeat, if I had been the captain I would at least have told ATC that, yes, thank you for your information and your concern, but I would prefer to stick to my original flight plan and contact my company ops to discuss the options. I strongly suspect that, either the MIG was already close to the 737 – although, why are there no photos taken by any of the passengers? Or, the second option: the pilots did make their intentions clear and that part of the ATC tapes has also been overwritten and the transcript forged.
  And I still do not understand where claim originates from that a cabin attendant told Protasevic that they had to hand him over “because it is in Ryanair’s legal agreements”. That is total and absolute b..sh..t. There cannot be a “legal obligation” to simply hand over a passenger to authorities, not without a proper warrant. There was no mention of Protasevic being a terrorist, involved in a bomb threat. A cabin attendant is not in charge, it would have been the decision of the captain. And what was the “legal agreement”? In the captain’s on-board library would have been a copy of the airline’s basic operations manual. It should contain a section about how to act in the event of a hijack. This part of the story sounds totally made up, it does not have the ring of truth, but carries the smell of something very rotten.
  State hijacking or piracy? Never mind the semantics. Whatever it is called, it was a gross breach of international aviation law.
  And Chip, I was also wondering who Admin User” is. This blog is used mainly to discuss aviation stories. Most if not all bloggers have transparent aliases. I am using my own name. No disguise.

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  • Sylvia’s report does not say what the crew told the passengers. “We have a bomb onboard and will divert to minsk” sounds likely to induce a panic? So if they announced the diversion with a white lie (“technical trouble”), the cabin attendant could not have told Protosevic “we were told the bomb is GPS-coded, therefore we can’t fly to Vilnius” and would have needed to make something up on the spot.
    The attendant might have said that it is company policy to always divert to closest airport, and somebody may have misunderstood this to indicate a legal requirement.

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• I asked a friend who’s a retired flight-data-recorder engineer the question I asked above about preserving the CVR contents. His reply:

  “Hi Ed, not sure what the configuration of the latest B737 is, but you can usually trip the circuit breaker to the CVR to preserve the last 2 hours of data. This used to be something suggested at , and I remember one incident where it was done. No other way, like event marker, to capture the data. Best bet is to have an MP3 recorder on the flight deck! Trouble is that if you then do another sector who is to say that something wouldn’t happen that is also needed on the CVR. A very grey area, but the probability of second event is pretty low. They could have asked for a replacement CVR and carried the old one home by hand of captain, but that would be tricky at an unknown airport.”

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  • “This used to be something suggested at , and I remember…” should have included a marker to show where I redacted the name of the airline he worked for but the WordPress HTML sanitization dropped it completely. Silly me for using angle brackets instead of square brackets.

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• Mendel,
  I would think that the usual company policy would be to fly to the nearest SUITABLE airport. Insofar as I can see from the graphs, Minsk was probably not even the nearest airport, by the looks of it Vilnius would have been just as close. Maybe even closer. Suitable? I don’t know, Minsk may have been a designated alternate but the way the ATC transcript is presented, there are many questions. The Polish crew must have been aware that the political situation in Belarus is not a very stable one. Very sinister that Belarus suddenly came with this bomb scare.
  It may be interesting to hear the official reactions of Ryanair. Usually crews have ways of communicating with their HQ Ops. HF radio can provide cover world-wide. I have been based in Lagos, Nigeria in the early ‘eighties. I flew a Learjet 25D, but the company also operated Falcon 20s. There had been a fire in the main telecoms building, and phone communications were very difficult. The Falcons had HF, so if we wanted to call home (like ET), we cranked up the Falcon’s APU, switched on the HF and asked Bern Radio to give us a phone patch – to virtually any country in the world. This was on the ground, in Africa. Technology has made strides so I am convinced that the Ryanair crew would have been able to talk to their own company, certainly at FL 390.
  The news reports mentioned that Protasevic and his girlfriend were escorted off the flight by a few goons who did not re-board either.
  It is crystal clear that this act of terrorism had been planned beforehand.
  Yesterday there were some clips on the news showing Putin and his buddy Lukashenko having dinner together on board of a large yacht.
  No doubt they had a good laugh about the impotent frustration of the West.

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  • The problem with Vilnius is this:

    ATC RYR 2TZ for your information, we have information from special services that you have bomb on board and it can be activated over Vilnius

    Trusting law enforcement, if there really had been a GPS-activated bomb aboard the aircraft, Vilnius was not a “suitable” airport, but Minsk was. They could possibly have diverted to Kaunas (in Lithuania), but that would not have been “nearest suitable” and still somewhat risky; however, I suspect that that’s what aircraft will do in the future in similar situations.

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• A Ryanair 737-800,registration EI-EMO, en route from Dublin to Krakow, diverted to Berlin last night due to an (apparently) false bomb threat.
  https://www.aerotime.aero/28039-ryanair-boeing737-diverts-to-Berlin-after-bomb-threat

  So far, no dissidents have come forward and claimed to have been arrested.

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  • I meant to comment when you put this up; this is very interesting. Shame it doesn’t seem like there will be much follow-up on the details (not unreasonable when it comes to bombs and terrorists) but I’d love more information as to how the threat manifested itself.

    Just that it seems to be an extremely convenient example of an aircraft landing in a foreign country in regards to an unproven threat.

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• A tiny niggling question still bothers me: If a bomb “can be triggered over Vilnius”, who or what pulls the trigger?
  ATC (in this case, the goons behind the conversations) must have guessed – correctly – that the crew would have been rattled by this message. Who wouldn’t? When did they come into possession of that information – not knowing that it was false ? The disclosure so late in the flight did not give the crew much time to consider their options.
  Transcripts of conversations must have been doctored, maybe we will learn a bit more detail about what really went on.
  Of course, only the details are uncertain.
  The core of the story is simple and clear enough: A Russian puppet regime wanted to arrest a prominent dissident.
  This open act of state terrorism seems calculated to send a message to ALL dissidents: No matter where you are, we will get you. We will do so by any means, even criminal, We will even breach international law. And we do not care about it, no matter how loud other toothless governments protest.

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  • One way to trigger a bomb over Vilnius would be to have a radio transmitter in Vilnius triggering the bomb once the aircraft comes in range. Another way would be for a smartphone in the luggage to play a sound once GPS shows it reaches a certain region (or crosses a certain latitude) and to use the voltage from that sound to trigger an attached bomb that has been smuggled aboard the plane. Both of these mechanisms could be prevented from triggering by not flying to Vilnius.

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• Technically of course it is possible to trigger a bomb by GPS, or by mobile phone.
  But these solutions, solutions of course as seen from the viewpoint of a terrorist, are unnecessarily complicated.
  Sometimes there is a simple timing device, or a barometric trigger that is primed when an aircraft climbs to cruising altitude and triggers the explosive device when descending.
  The bomb that brought down the PanAm 747 over Lockerbie in Scotland in the ‘eighties was triggered by a timer. The intention of the terrorists had been to bring the aircraft down over the open Atlantic. A delay on departure meant that it was still over land.
  But anyway, the whole scenario of the false bomb alert and the subsequent diversion to Minsk only makes sense if the intention was to force the Ryanair flight to divert to Belarus in order to arrest a dissident (I would actually consider him to be a man of high courage and integrity).
  The flight crew could in theory have worked out for themselves that they were being set up. In reality of course, the whole process was intended to get them rattled enough to follow “ATC” instructions.
  They did not have time to figure out what was going on, that was part of the plan: to wait until the final segment of the flight, probably just before top of descent into Vilnius, in order to deprive them of the time needed to analyse the situation and either continue to their destination, or divert to another airport in a less unstable state.
  Would I have been fooled in the same situation? Probably, yes.

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