Belarus hijacks a Ryanair flight

[Madrigal]

This is straight up State terrorism. They hijacked a plane and kidnapped two people. An Irish plane flying between Greece and Lithuania, two EU countries, and what is the response from the EU? Stop flying over Belarus airspace? I guess that'll show them. WTF? I know they mentioned maybe some sanctions in the future, but this weakass response is shameful.

[Senseye]

That Lukashenko (Belarus president) is a real piece of work. Straight up old school soviet thug. Naturally Russia and Putin love him.

[Ferrus]

This is straight up State terrorism. They hijacked a plane and kidnapped two people. An Irish plane flying between Greece and Lithuania, two EU countries, and what is the response from the EU? Stop flying over Belarus airspace? I guess that'll show them. WTF? I know they mentioned maybe some sanctions in the future, but this weakass response is shameful.

Although funnily banning flying in their airspace is a kind of sanction. When I used to work for an air tech company we had a Russia guy who used to work for the Russian civil aviation authority come in and explain the market there, Belarus and Russia are some of the very few countries that charge fees for flying over their airspace. Obviously this is less valuable for Belarus than Russia - as Siberia is the main corridor for the great circles that take planes from Europe to China and Japan and earns Russia some serious money given the quantity of traffic that flows into the Far East these days, at least before the pandemic - though there are obviously a few north-south routes that are optimised through there but should be pretty easy to avoid, just as airlines found avoiding Ukrainian airspace pretty straight forward a few years ago. I remember I asked this guy what would happen if an airline didn't pay, would they shoot it down, and he just told me 'no one has not paid on time yet'.

The weirdest was a leg of a trip I did from Barcelona to Singapore via Doha in Qatar. We had to fly over Iran to get to Qatar because Qatarian airways was banned by Saudi air authorities during the spat those countries had a few years ago.