Why Every Airline Should Worry About the Political Hijacking of Commercial Flight
Photo Credit: Air traffic control (O'Hare Airport's tower is pictured here) is increasingly vulnerable to global politics and autocracies. Flickr / Phil Roeder
Skift Take
The diversion of a Ryanair flight to Belarus a week ago to detain an outspoken critic and journalist shows us that air traffic control may be increasingly vulnerable to the politics of autocracies. That should send a chill through airline C-suites with the industry needing as few disruptions as possible to chart its recovery.
As airlines latch on to the good news that more and more people are booking flights after the worst year in the modern history of commercial aviation, it's easy to look beyond the hijacking of a Ryanair flight — en route from Greece to Lithuania — to Minsk in Belarus as a scary but almost certain anomaly.
After all, the impact to business from the May 23 incident was nil. And the reactions were mostly as expected.
The big global airlines group, the International Air Transport Association (IATA), strongly condemned "any interference or requirement for landing of civil aviation operations." As Skift's Airline Weekly reported, the European Union advised the bloc’s airlines to avoid Belarusian airspace and will ban Belarusian carriers from overflying Europea
