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> It’s odd to me that the Ryanair flight yesterday was already closer to its destination of Vilnius than Minsk when it turned around.

Closer, but it had the wrong altitude for Vilnius. They were intercepted earlier. See this visualization

https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1396482250812841986

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Very interesting! Is there a sensible explanation for this? Have they known up-front that the flight is going to be diverted? Or maybe they were radio-ed before, and there was some discussion / negotiation (during which time, they aborted their descent to Vilnius)...

A plane slows down in descent to an airport, so my guess would be that they tried to leave Belarusian airspace as fast as possible, but it wasn't fast enough.

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