O'Leary: Forced landing in Belarus was 'state-sponsored hijacking' | Hacker News Reader

O'Leary: Forced landing in Belarus was 'state-sponsored hijacking'

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127 pointsericdanielski41 comments

O'Leary: Continues to fly his plane over the same route the very next day because passengers didn't buy the "anti kidnap" add-on

https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1396771259724206082...

Airlines can't just fly their planes off on whatever windy route over Europe they feel like. Did all the other airlines start avoiding Belarus Airspace?

Several of them did, yes.

Quite a few of them yes, looks like. The other threads has actually flight paths posted that clearly show that.

Many did. And no they can't "just do it". The hijacking was yesterday, the Ryanair flight took off from Pathos today.

They can file a flightpath avoiding Belarus. Maybe it would be 100 miles longer rather than 50, adding 15 minutes to the journey, and a few extra dollars to the gas bill.

Very poor judgement.

The linked tweet is a follow-up to an earlier tweet showing several airlines did just that.

What did that journalist do to anger Belarus that badly?

He was only 26 years old... How do you stoke a regime so badly they send a bunch of KGB agents after you? Most journalists at age 26 are still writing about cats stuck up trees...

Roman Protasevich is wanted for organising last year’s protests against Alexander Lukashenko

How? You stand for election. Why? You forget to lose.

Edit: misread comment

I think he's taking about the current president.

He was a co-editor of the most popular Telegram channel, which people used to get the news and coordinate the protests. The protests (spanning dozens of cities and towns, hundreds of thousands people, lasting months) dealt a blow to ego of Lukashenko.

It is remarkable that Tsikhankuskaya, seen as winning the elections in August and now in exile, was taking the same route a week ago but he chose Roman to be abducted instead. Just shows how deeply he got under Luka skin and why there is zero chance for calls to release him to have any effect. He literally bet the future of country's civil aviation for petty revenge.

tl;dr: Live your life so they have to intercept you with fighter jets by your mid-20s.

He dared to report the truth about a maniacal dictator.

Belarus was home to VERY large protests last year, which were quashed not with compromise but with state force. This is not a stable government, at all.

It's less what Protasevich did per se and more that Lukashenko desperately needs to be seen as unopposable. The problem with employing crackdowns as a means to ensure stability is that you need to keep escalating so long as the opposition isn't completely crushed.

We're seeing the same thing happening in Russia right now, though on a much slower fuse.

They're trying to send a message. Kill an old guy who's already spent a career doing reputational damage and everyone will shrug it off as one of the risks of the business. Kill someone before they do much to you and it sends a stronger message.

https://twitter.com/VoicesBelarus/status/1396806559792082945

I won't be surprised if all flies in/out to Belarus are suspended.

I suspect insuring planes flying to/from/through Belarus just got a lot more expensive.

State-sponsored hijacking when they do it, friendly landing to refuel when we do it.

No, they were both "state-sponsored hijacking".

I don't think anyone is particularly proud of their involvement in the Snowden-Morales case, it was a shameful case of bootlicking to an enraged US emperor. The point "we" should make is that, if we really believe in civil democracy, these things should not happen ever again, no matter the flag.

“We...”

Did you intend to place yourself in the camp of a petty (in both senses) dictator?

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