Ukraine war
Conscious provocation? Aeroflot passenger jets enter restricted airspace
The mysterious Aeroflot flight path of SU7236 on Monday from Moscow to Istanbul
© flightradar24.com
At the beginning of the week, the EU imposed flight bans on Russian aircraft. Nevertheless, two Russian airliners tried to fly through the no-fly zone – partly with success.
On Sunday, Canada also imposed an overflight ban on Russian planes. “We will hold Russia accountable for its unprovoked attacks on Ukraine,” Canada’s Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said. Nevertheless, an Airbus of the Russian airline Aeroflot flew over Canadian territory near Newfoundland late Sunday evening.
The Airbus A350-900 took off from Miami around 3 p.m. with a delay of about 75 minutes and reached Moscow on Monday morning – the last Russian aircraft to make it back to Moscow from North America. Canadian interceptors had not taken off to stall the jet or force it to land. The Canadian Ministry of Transport only stated that “Aeroflot flight number 111 violated the ban put in place,” it said on Twitter. An investigation has been initiated.
In contrast to the transatlantic flight, which reached its destination undisturbed, another Aeroflot machine, which was traveling from Moscow to Verona around noon on Monday, fared. It was not a regular scheduled flight, but a charter flight with flight number SU7236.
The mysterious flight SU7236
The Boeing 737 initially flew southeast, making a very long detour via Kazakhstan before turning west via the Caspian Sea and Georgia. Apparently, the pilots wanted to prevent early detection by NATO’s AWACS aircraft, which were constantly circling over south-eastern Europe for airspace reconnaissance even before the outbreak of war.
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Parallel to Turkey’s north coast, the Boeing with the registration VQ-BWF flew north past Istanbul and, after reaching Greek airspace, canceled the cruising flight to Italy. As can be seen on a screenshot of the website flighrader24.com, the jet circled the Greek-Turkish border area for half an hour after a five-hour flight, made a U-turn and finally landed in Istanbul.
It is interesting that in both cases these are aircraft with no Russian country code. This begins with the letters RU. The registrations of the affected jets with VQ-BFY and VQ-BWF bear the country code VQ, which stands for Bermuda.
Similar to shipping, aircraft in aviation are also registered in other countries for tax reasons. This practice is particularly common with private jets because it has another advantage: the owner of the aircraft cannot be determined by looking at the identification.
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– Belavia is banned from flying in the EU: the boycott mainly affects Belarusians
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