Moscow-Cuba flight skirts US airspace, prompts speculation Snowden is aboard | Hacker News Reader

Moscow-Cuba flight skirts US airspace, prompts speculation Snowden is aboard

rt.com

79 pointsRockyMcNuts44 comments

We sent the following to the media this morning:

Hello from FlightAware.com,

We are receiving a large volume of calls about Aeroflot 150, en route from Moscow to Havana asking if the Southern routing across the Atlantic Ocean is typical and asking if this routing avoids US airspace.

Because of winds (which blow East), the flight generally takes a more Northern route, up over Iceland, through Canada, and down the Eastern seaboard. However, on days when the winds are light or unusual, it can be more favorable to take a more Southern route which also avoids the additional overflight fees from Canada and the US. The route being flown today is comparable distance to the Northern/Canada route, although it appears significantly more direct due to flat projections of a curved Earth. The flight duration today is about the same as the last couple weeks, which suggest they're taking this routing due to winds/overflight fees. The last two times we saw this flight take a similar route were June 20 and June 8.

On the route it's flying today, it will fly in US airspace; the US controls most of the Western half of the North Atlantic. To actually avoid US airspace, a flight from Moscow to Havana would likely have to fly South to (approximately) Western Sahara and then West, which would be about 30% further than either of the routings discussed above.

> the US controls most of the Western half of the North Atlantic

By "controls" I assume that means air traffic control, rather than any kind of legal jurisdiction.

Yes.

thanks for this info! Much more detailed than the newspapers...

I'm confused about the distinction between air traffic controlled airspace and sovereign airspace. It seems that international law would only allow sovereignty over airspace within 12 nautical miles of the coastline. Can you comment?

the US provides ATC services for the western half of the mid-north atlantic, even if it's not our sovereign airspace.

The flight does appear to be completely avoiding the US.

Previous flight on this route: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/AFL150/history/20130708/1...

Current flight: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/AFL150/history/20130711/1...

Maybe they're taking a shortcut to save kerosine? :) Interesting to see though, as I would expect for flights to Cuba always to avoid US airspace.

Great circles are the shortest route.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Circle

I'm sensing a great circle joke with s/kerosene/kerosine/

Please don't drag the conversation off onto a tangent.

Ok, so admittedly that was a lesser circle joke.

The route that goes over the U.S. is shorter.

By 18 minutes. It's hardly a huge diversion.

I know you're kidding, but for the edification of anyone wondering why the normal route looks longer than the current route:

Lines on maps are not accurate representations of the shortest distance between the points, because maps are 2d representations of a 3d globe. The shortest path is approximately along a "great circle"[1], which looks like the path in the first link.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_circle

The normal route is shorter. The map projection is misleading.

It also seems to be avoiding some of the weather that past through the south-eastern states.

It turns out the change in path was because of the weather in the North Atlantic today: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/07/11...

Though if it hasn't landed yet, who knows, maybe he is on board.

Yeah but look at these flights:

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/AFL150/history/20130707/2...

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/AFL150/history/20130702/2...

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/AFL150/history/20130701/2...

All of those nearly miss US airspace. This flight just happens to miss it a bit more.

Between this and the crash at SFO - be interested to see how much Flightaware's traffic has spiked.

David from FlightAware here. The last few days have indeed been very hectic on the ops side.

This data is public at Quantcast: https://www.quantcast.com/flightaware.com

Those don't look like real flight paths.

In fact if you click on the track log they all say "Estimated" at all their points.

Okay, but the other flight paths that are more "normal" are also estimated. And nobody seems to be questioning them.

I'm not saying Snowden is or is not on the flight. Just that getting all excited about a route deviation might be a bit premature given that there isn't a hard rule about where you're supposed to fly.

No, you are wrong. All of those flights, and all flights on the Moscow-Havana route, follow the great circle route because it is the shortest distance. Flights that must divert for winds or turbulence or scheduling follow a modified great circle route.

Today's Aeroflot 150 does not follow a great circle route, modified or otherwise. Such a deviation has nothing to do with weather or other environmental factors and can only be explained by a need to avoid a particular airspace and the potential for diversion to an alternate airport within that airspace in case of an emergency.

You will notice that the route overflies the Azores, Bermuda and Nassau so that those airports, rather than airports in continental North America, can be used as alternates when filing the flight plan.

This is the most telling aspect of the diversion, even more so than the diversion from the great circle.

Someone important who needs to avoid the airspace over North America at all costs is on that plane.

Compare this: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/AFL150/history/20130708/1...

With this: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/AFL150/history/20130707/2...

What you see is a substantial deviation from one to the other. One flies over land in the US quite a bit, the other only very briefly.

If headwinds are bad enough on the great circle route it could actually be more efficient to take a non-great-circle route. Airplanes fly relative to the air, not the ground. So if the air is moving fast enough in the wrong direction it can lengthen the route substantially. The jetstream can be more than 100mph. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_stream

EDIT: It's also not terribly wise to state something as fact (that I am wrong) when neither of us will know either way until the media reports on it. We can both speculate, but unless we know the pilots on the airplane and they confided in us prior to the flight, we can't know. I don't know the pilots and I suspect that you don't either. So let's not dress up guesswork as facts.

Both of the examples you gave are great circle routes. Today's Af150 route is not, in any way, a modified great circle route.

One correction: upon looking again at FlightAware, it is clear that the flight specifically avoided controlled airspace around the Azores, probably because Portugal has strenuously declined to allow overflights that may have certain passengers aboard.

Edit: I mean you are wrong about "happens to miss", that's all. Planning air routes is not a matter of happenstance, and all of the examples you have given run counter to your argument, because they prove that Moscow-Havana flights invariably follow a great circle or a modified great circle route. If you can show me any previous AF150 that follows a flight path that resembles today's flight path, I will concede the point.

Here are two previous flights which are not in any way modified great circle routes:

https://flightaware.com/live/flight/AFL150/history/20130620/...

https://flightaware.com/live/flight/AFL150/history/20130608/...

Yes. It is extremely interesting that both of those flights started out on a more northerly route over Scandinavia and overflew Great Britain.

Today's flight started out on a much mores southerly route, overflying Belrus, Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and France, but avoiding Spain, Portugal and the Azores.

Thank-you for the information. I am probably wrong. We'll see.

Here's a Washington Post update : unusual turbulence over Greenland. :http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/07/11...

It is absolutely amazing that we have this information (and the ability to graph it) at our fingertips.

My guess is that it isn't anything special. It flew over France after all and France denied the Bolivian Presidential plane access to French airspace on suspicion that Snowden was aboard.

Here's the great circle route on a map: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=svo-hav

The article mentions weather but can anyone explain in more detail why flights don't always take this (bypassing USA) route? It seems much more direct. My only guess is safety (nowhere to make an emergency landing for most of this shorter route).

The world is a sphere, the projections shown in the article don't reflect that. Russia is near the "top" of the world, so flying north is the quickest way to go south, on the opposite "side" of the planet.

Good point, I never thought about that.

Imagine that map on a sphere. The higher you go, the shorter the distance. If you flew directly over the North Pole you'd jump from one half of the map directly to the other.

The path over the US is the shortest path. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great-circle_navigation

The route usually taken is closer to:

Great Circle Distance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great-circle_distance

Flat maps distort global distances. If you draw a direct line on a globe or Google Earth, you'll see why they take this path.

Google Earth screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/WyIxmC5.png

Regarding great circles and flight routes, a nice feature of Wolfram Alpha is that it will actually display the great-circle route as a straight line, so you can see where it goes:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=moscow+to+havana

The projection is a polar projection about the origin, so great circles through Moscow are straight lines.

http://cryptome.org/

Notice that the Cryptome URLs say "manning-flight" instead of "snowden-flight". Freudian slip?

Would love to watch the Soviet err I mean Russian reaction if the US tried to force the plane down in ATL or MIA.

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