November 19, 2022

LAST WEEK, a court in Holland found three men responsible for the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 eight years ago.

Back in 2014, operating in eastern Ukraine, they were part of a separatist group under Russian control, responsible for firing the “Buk” rocket that struck the Boeing 777 at 33,000 feet during a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Cruising just above restricted commercial airspace, the plane had been misidentified as a military target. The men — Igor Firkin, Sergei Dubinsky, and Leonid Kharchenko — were found guilty in absentia and sentenced to life. Currently free and living in Russia, it’s unlikely they ever will serve time.

MH17 was carrying 298 people from 17 countries, including 80 children. That ghastly total puts MH17 at number seven among the deadliest air disasters of all time. In the Netherlands, where 196 of the victims lived, the catastrophe was and remains front-page news. Strangely, the rest of the world seems to have forgotten about it. It never stayed in the headlines for especially long, and shortly thereafter it ceased to be much of a topic, even in aviation circles. It’s peculiar how many lesser disasters, even those that occurred decades ago, are fresher in our minds. Ask a pilot about MH17 and you’re liable to get a blank stare. “Which one was that?”

Is that a symptom of our diminished attention spans, or something else? Maybe it was the certain-ness of the accident, and the ugly brutality of it. Unlike many crashes, there was no mystery or mystique surrounding this one. From the very first day it was clear what had happened, and it was pretty grotesque.

It’s also true that Malaysia Airlines had already earned its fifteen minutes of infamy. It’s the carrier’s other major mishap, earlier that same year, that is more widely remembered and discussed. That’d be MH370, of course, the vanished 777, only a few parts of which have ever been found, washed up on beaches on Mauritius and Reunion islands. That one gets people talking, albeit nonsensically much of the time.

MH17 wasn’t the first commercial jet downed by the Russians. Many of you will remember the tragedy of Korean Air Lines flight 007 in 1983. The Boeing 747 was on a flight from New York to Seoul when it strayed off course and was blown up by a Soviet fighter jet. The worldwide outrage the followed was a lot more intense than anything stoked by MH17.

Ditto after the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes accidentally shot down an Iran Air jetliner in July, 1988, killing 290 people.

The Iran Air incident sits at number eight on that list of deadliest disasters. KAL 007 was, until 2014, the tenth worst, nudged to number eleven by MH17. This means that three of history’s eleven worst crashes were planes brought down by missiles. Add in Lockerbie (number 10), plus the 1985 Air India bombing (number 5), and five of the worst eleven — nearly half — were either missiles or bombs.

It’s not entirely fair, lumping those together. The bombings were deliberate; the shoot-downs were cases of mistaken identity. We will save for later the bigger and deeper conversation over what does or doesn’t constitute an “accident,” and the sticky applications of culpability. MH17, Iran Air, KAL 007; each of these involved a certain amount of recklessness. At what point, though, does an error become criminal?

And this isn’t the first time someone has been convicted in absentia for destroying a commercial plane. In 1999, a court in Paris found six Libyans guilty for the bombing of UTA flight 772 ten years earlier, including the brother-in-law of Moammar Khadafy. None of the six stood trial. The explosion, over a remote part of the Sahara, killed 170 people. A U.S. judge later ordered Libya to pay $6 billion in damages on behalf of seven Americans who’d been on board.

Some of my U.S. readers have asked why the Malaysia Airlines flights are always referred to alpha-numerically: MH17 and MH370. Most Americans don’t realize that flight numbers are prefixed by a two-character airline code. The code for Malaysia Airlines is MH. In the United States we normally drop these prefixes, but they are used routinely elsewhere. This is discussed in more detail in chapter seven of my book.

And the name of the airline is Malaysia Airlines. It’s not “Malaysian Airlines,” and certainly not “Malaysian Air.”

Malaysia Airlines was formed in the early 1970s after its predecessor, Malaysia-Singapore Airlines (MSA), split to become Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines. Both carriers are renowned for their outstanding service, and cabin crews of both airlines wear the iconic, floral-pattern “Sarong Kabaya” batik — an adaptation of the traditional Malay kebaya blouse.

Malaysia Airlines’ logo, pictured above, is an indigenous kite known as the Wau. True story: In 1993 I was in the city of Kota Bahru, a conservative Islamic town in northern Malaysia close to the Thai border, when we saw a group of little kids flying Wau kites. At the time I didn’t realize where the airline’s logo had come from, but I recognized the pattern immediately. It was one of those airline/culture crossover moments that we aerophiles really savor.

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March 4, 2022

THE RUSSIAN invasion of Ukraine is impacting commercial aviation on multiple fronts — as wars tend to do. It remains to be seen how long the effects last, or how deeply they’ll be felt. Will NATO countries join the fight? Will tourists shy away from European destinations in general? Even in a best case scenario, this is the last thing the airline industry needs, just as the coronavirus pandemic appears to be winding down.

Oil is knocking at $130 a barrel as nations discuss ratcheting up sanctions, possibly banning the import of Russian petroleum. Although jet fuel prices have been higher in the past, the problem, right now, is that airlines lack the pricing power to stay in synch. Business travel is still down considerably, especially in transoceanic markets, and passing these costs to the customer is more difficult than it was in, say, 2008, when oil was last this expensive. The price could skyrocket further; it could stabilize or fall. Nobody knows.

Meanwhile, Russia has closed off its airspace to foreign carriers. The big issue here isn’t so much the cancellation of flights to and from Russian cities, but rather those routes overflying Russian territory, especially the country’s northern areas, including Siberia. Russia is a gigantic piece of land, and hundreds of long-haul flights overfly these regions weekly on routes connecting Europe and North America with Asia.

This might not make sense if you’re looking at a flat map or atlas; you need a globe to better visualize it. The shortest distance from the U.S. to India, for example, goes more or less due north, up over Siberia and down through the very heart of Russia. A flight from the U.K., France or Germany headed to Japan, China or Korea, similarly relies on Russian airspace.

United Airlines has suspended its flights to Delhi, but on the whole it’s the Asian and European airlines who are feeling the pain. Most flights between the U.S. and Pacific Rim cities can be re-routed without much trouble. This isn’t so for flights between Asia and Europe. Alternate routings are possible — down through the Gulf, across India and such — but they’re substantially longer, in some cases requiring a stopover. Not only does this increase fuel costs, it wreaks havoc with logistics, crew staffing and scheduling. Longer travel times mean that passengers can no longer make onward connections, and so on. It’s a very expensive problem, with disruptions rippling through an airline’s operation.

JAL and All Nippon have cancelled all of their flights to Europe. Air France, KLM, Lufthansa and British Airways have been canceling or re-routing dozens of departures. This simply isn’t sustainable.

To say nothing of the airspace over Ukraine, which has become a no-fly zone for pretty much anybody (though, as of a few days ago, Air India’s flights to and from Europe were still passing overhead). The skies above Ukraine are obviously dangerous, but this isn’t new. People have largely forgotten about it, but eight years ago, pro-Russian forces shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over the country’s disputed Donbas region, killing 298 people. (In 1983, a Soviet fighter jet shot down Korean Air Lines flight 007 after it strayed into restricted airspace over Sakhalin Island, killing all 246 on board. And in 1988, the Navy cruiser Vincennes shot down Iran Air flight 655 over the Persian Gulf, killing 290.)

Reciprocally, many nations have banned Russian-registered planes from their own airspace. This includes the European Union, Canada, and the United States. The big loser here is Aeroflot, which had been flying to dozens of European capitals, as well as to New York and Los Angeles. Aeroflot’s routes to Caribbean holiday destinations are affected as well.

Even worse for Aeroflot, Boeing and Airbus have cut ties with the carrier (as well as with other Russian airlines), and will no longer offer support or supplies. Aircraft lessors have rescinded their leases, and Sabre, which acts as Aeroflot’s online booking agent, will no longer allow customers to book seats. This will severely cripple Russian’s commercial aviation sector, if not ground it completely.

One of the oldest airlines in the world, Aeroflot began flying 98 years ago. In its Cold War heydays, it was by far the largest airline in existence, roughly the size of all the U.S. carriers combined. Numerous smaller airlines splintered off following the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Aeroflot itself carries on, still using its elegant, Soviet-era hammer and sickle logo.

Aeroflot has never had much of a reputation either for service or safety. Some of that is deserved, some not. Flipping through the crash records from the 1960s through the 2000s, the Aeroflot name does appear more than any other. But you have to consider its size at the time. Add up all of the crashes involving American carriers during the same span, and now the totals are a lot more equal. Since the Soviet breakup it has had only four fatal accidents, one of which involved a subsidiary.

One of my biggest thrills was riding aboard Aeroflot in 1986. We flew from Moscow to Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was still called at the time, on a Tupolev Tu-154 — the Russian version of the 727. A few days later, on the quick hop from from Leningrad to Helsinki, it was a Tu-134. The babushka cabin attendants served us a cup of tasteless, urine-colored apple juice and what appeared to be a hamburger bun stuffed with newspaper.

Next to me on the plane out of Moscow sat a Muscovite about my age –- a blond kid with a jawline like the villainous commie boxer from Rocky IV. This was 1986, remember, with the Cold War still on, and my seatmate was aghast at the novelty of encountering an actual American. He was thrilled to shake my hand and try out his English. He’d just gotten a new camera, and he took it from the overhead bin to show me proudly. At least I think it was a camera. Oversized and clunky, the device looked like a blender held sideways. He kept calling it “my apparatus.”

Our high-altitude détente continued all the way to Leningrad. “I can show you of America,” said my friend. And with that he took out a piece of paper. Beaming, he proceeded to draw me a picture of the World Trade Center, accurately placing the north tower’s cloud-popping rooftop antenna. Pointing to the buildings he said, “One hundred and ten stories!”

Ukraine, by the way, is the home of Antonov, which has been building commercial airplanes since 1946. Formerly known as the Antonov Design Bureau, the company is named for its founding designer, Oleg Antonov, and for decades was a supplier of passenger and cargo planes for the Soviet Union.

Last week, at Hostomel Airport outside Kiev, Russian forces destroyed the only example of the Antonov An-225, the six-engine behemoth originally built to carry the Soviet space shuttle, “Buran.” It was the largest airplane ever made.

I once saw the An-225 at Bradley Airport outside of Hartford, Connecticut, of all places. It had been chartered there to pick up medical equipment, we were told, for the treatment of victims of the Chernobyl disaster.

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