FAA Adds Middle East Airspace Restrictions

Why be skeptical about the cause of the UIA crash in Iran this morning being a result of a massive technical fault of some sort or another?

The plane was mostly full of Iranian-origin persons leaving Iran or relatives of such persons. Iranians, Canadians, Ukrainians and Swedes were the vast majority of the passengers on this plane.

@ GUWonder -- I'm skeptical because we have a government claiming immediately that a crash was a technical fault. I'm not saying it wasn't, I'm saying I'm skeptical because of the timing, and because of how the country is handling this. If this wasn't a technical fault, I wouldn't necessarily assume that whatever happened was supposed to happen. As you point out, many of the passengers were Iranian.

I had so much hope for the world 20 years ago. But we are really little different than the other families of squabbling primates.
Sorry if you believe in creationism, but the madness and savagery of our close Chimp relatives gives a clue to how other animals would view humans.

Actually, if Qatar Airways was not able to use Iran/Iraq airspace, they could fly between Doha and Kuwait, and thats about it.

Doha TMA is bounded by Bahrain FIR which in turn has transition to Tehran FIR, Emirates FIR, Kuwait FIR and Jeddah FIR. Qatari aircraft cannot operate to any points in Bahrain FIR other than those in Qatar itself, nor to any points in Emirates or Jeddah FIRs - which means they would have to exit Bahrain FIR to Kuwait FIR.

Kuwait FIR in turn only leads to Baghdad FIR, Tehran FIR and Jeddah FIR. If they couldn't operate to any of these points, that would leave DOH-KWI as their only possible route.

The Ukrainian government claimed it was a technical fault -- even put up such a notice on at least one of its embassy pages -- and then took it down. Maybe someone will claim this was an Iranian cyberattack on the Ukrainian embassies too?

Heat-seeking projectiles definitely love plane engines, so I am definitely not ruling it out.

I will note that the UIA plane did manage to turn back in a sort of controlled manner and sort of descend in a sort of controlled manner with at least one engine apparently on fire. So the cockpit crew probably wasn't silent during the rather controlled turn of the plane while on fire. It's not like the plane just plummeted to the ground immediately upon a hit by a massive missile.

Tehran airport and its surroundings are very well recorded areas by the Iranians and by those hostile to Iran. So it will be interesting to see how imagery comes out about this plane showing what was going on before its pieces were found on the ground.

Aniro,

Sadly, it seems too true that humans have no better conflict manage skills across the board than the worst of our related species in the primate family. And whoever is buddies in one part at one time may turn out to be enemies in a different part at the same or different time. Looking at the bizarre bedfellows in play in various conflict zones of the world makes for some very interesting revelations about how conflicted and complicated people are and how much conflict there really is. Yet despite that, the human species is only where it is because we learned to cooperate and act in communitarian ways and use that to rise above being just a monkey with a bit less hair. But give it to homo sapiens to be its own biggest threat as a species.

Since the Iranians have threatened to attack Dubai with missiles if Trump retaliates, I suspect passengers will be a bit leary of flying Emirates or Etihad if they continue to overfly Iran or the Gulf.

Probably stupid question, but how does one see the "typical" routes for certain flights?
Specifically I'm looking at EY from JFK to AUH, continuing to MLE.

If you saw the video of the UA aircraft descending in flames, you have to wonder what kind of "mechanical fault" could cause that. Lots of uninformed commenters on media news sites have tried to say "well, it's a 737". This is stupid nonsense. For one think, the 737NG is an incredibly reliable aircraft. Secondly, even in the two incidents involving the MAX, none of those planes were engulfed in flames on the way down.

No, my first inclination is to say that the Iranian ground forces were trigger happy with anti-aircraft fire and hit this aircraft. That would explain everything. But, i am also confident that the mullahs that run Iran will never permit anyone to admit to the error.

Which is why it would be best for civilian aircraft to avoid this entire area for the time being.

Much like lots of uninformed commenters on blog sites offering their first inclination?

Wow QF is blocking 90 seats?!? Wow! It has 166 economy seats so that's more than half of economy! That's also roughly 60% load capacity given the plane can seat 236 pax.

I guess this answers my question, LOL:

https://www.etihad.com/en-us/announcements/etihad-airways-statement-on-airspace-restrictions/

@mjonis Check FlightRadar24 for past flight paths

Planes don't fall out of the sky with no distress call or mayday. It will be known soon that some idiot sitting in a room in Tehran thought it a U.S. military aircraft and shot it down. It departed at 5:15AM just a few hours after Iran attacked. They were expecting immediate retaliation.

If it was a missile attack then ultimately trump is responsible given it is likely not to have happened otherwise

Commercial aircraft do not belong in war zones. Miscalculation of airlines and countries about the seriousness of war on commercial aviation have resulted in aviation disasters before.
These types of airspace restrictions have happened before and generally do not last for the long term as long as the military conflicts end. For now, the ME3's business is bound to be impacted by passengers that want to be nowhere near the Middle East.

Russia is certainly raking in extra overflight fees as Europe-Asia flights take a northerly route across Asia.

I see that the EK flights from SFO and LAX today went over Iraq instead of Iran.

This will all be over in no time. It's distraction for bigger things coming.

BTW - US carriers fly over these countries daily. CARGO!

I just flew from Islamabad, Pakistan to Atlanta with the ticket booked through Doha, Paris, and Miami. I began these flights on Monday morning (PK time - or Sunday night EST) and thankfully no restrictions came into place yet. Otherwise the first two flights (on Qatar) were though Iran's airspace. Now I'm just back in the states on my couch recovering from 52 hours of travel watching CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera's coverage of this 😉

Lots of finger blaming at Iranalready in the comments, very conviently misssing out the last passenger plane that was shot down over Iran was in fact targeted by the U.S. military..

Friend of mine was on BA105, flying to dubai to cover the 24 hour race there, got diverted as well!

Does this mean economy class passengers on the Perth - London flight will get a row each? (or at the very least, empty middle seat)

This will hurt Qantas.

LH 704 from FRA to MLE is rerouting via Egypt (!!) and Saudi Arabia thanks to Iran.