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

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

fdej• 13 years ago

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

lettergram• 13 years ago

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

swamp40• 13 years ago

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

msandford3• 13 years ago

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.

ErikAugust• 13 years ago

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

DavidChouinard• 13 years ago

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

smkelly4• 13 years ago

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

pauldino• 13 years ago

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.

msandford3• 13 years ago

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.

ackfoo3• 13 years ago

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.

msandford3• 13 years ago

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.

k-mcgrady2• 13 years ago

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).

glesica• 13 years ago

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.

k-mcgrady2• 13 years ago

Good point, I never thought about that.

untog2• 13 years ago

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.

wf• 13 years ago

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

Zhenya2• 13 years ago

The route usually taken is closer to:

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

mapmeld• 13 years ago

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

scythe• 13 years ago

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.

Zhenya2• 13 years ago

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

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

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.

dpapathanasiou• 13 years ago

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.

_k• 13 years ago

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

smackfu• 13 years ago

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

smkelly4• 13 years ago

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.

TillE• 13 years ago

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.

smkelly4• 13 years ago

Yes.

dexcs• 13 years ago

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

lvs• 13 years ago

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?

smkelly4• 13 years ago

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

pcvarmint2• 13 years ago

http://cryptome.org/

pcvarmint2• 13 years ago

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

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

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