Not much you can do other than what it states here: https://www.aro.lfv.se/Editorial/View/5969/ES_ENR_1_12_en
Any country can do this physically because every country has absolute sovereignity over its airspace, but you wouldn’t do it to somebody who has a strong military, especially 40 F15s and 175 F16s, and especially nukes… In the former USSR that is the bottom line.
If, pre-1989 or so, I ended up on a plane diverting (for whatever reason) to one of the Soviet Bloc countries (with the possible exception of Tito-era Yugoslavia) I would have been dragged off the plane and returned to Czechoslovakia, for some “treatment”, and nothing the UK could have done about it despite me being a UK citizen. This was because I was still a CZ citizen, via birth; the only way around that was to turn up at the Czech embassy in London with a bag of used GBP currency (they stipulated “used”; it was used to finance their spy rings and various left wing / subversive organisations here e.g. the comm party, various “student” activist groups, etc). The amount was calculated according to how much education you received in CZ; for me it would have been a few k GBP but if you had a PhD it would be more like 20k GBP 
That payment cancels your CZ citizenship. So various holiday flights would not have been possible.
Dimme wrote:
Not much you can do other than what it states here: https://www.aro.lfv.se/Editorial/View/5969/ES_ENR_1_12_enES_ENR_1_12_en_pdf
This flight was not intercepted. Interception is for identification. I didn’t read anything about this flight not responding on the radio.
Apparently they were told about a bomb threat and told where to divert. That’s state terrorism and qualifies as hijacking.
Snoopy wrote:
Apparently they were told about a bomb threat and told where to divert. That’s state terrorism and qualifies as hijacking.
Given they were within a minute or two from leaving Belarussian airspace, would you have continued to Vilnius (which was a lot closer anyway) or flown to Minsk? Serious question for the airline pilot. I’m pretty sure the crew were totally unaware what was going on, although there were some early reports about an altercation in the cabin.
Edited to clear up airport mix-up
According to news reports, they had two fighter jets off their wing, telling them to divert because there was a bomb onboard.
So the crew could either
1. Believe the threat was real and follow the (presumably forceful) advise to divert after stating that they instead wanted to land at the nearest airport, or
2. Believe that they were being hijacked by the state and hope that the fighter jets didn’t have orders to shoot them down if they didn’t comply.
I very much doubt that they would have been shot down, but given what that state authorised, I couldn’t be 100% sure!
And in any case, the crew probably had little reason to doubt the information supplied.
The nearest airport was Vilnius… But not much crew could do here.
I don’t think if they had a choice between going to the nearest airport, which is the destination airport, and at the same time is within EU, versus going to Minsk airport with unknown costs, they would have preferred to go to Minsk…
Yes, looks like an act of state terrorism, and yes that crosses all possible lines, but so what?
Some countries will close air travel with Belarus, may be. So what? Do they really care?
would you have continued to Vilnius (which was a lot closer anyway) or flown to Minsk?
With fighters by the side and ATC mentioning „bomb“ quickly followed by „fly direct XYZ“ as a „solution“ I’d have gone to Minsk just as well.
I don’t think any airline pilot would have done something else (and perhaps realized this was political). Usually the perception is that ATC on the ground know more and can better assess a situation while pilots just try to get the plane down safely. Maybe the Bomb is set to explode based on location etc…
I can see some legacy airline capital C Captain in the 1990‘s have the necessary political hindsight and BALLS to do it differently, especially during open cockpit doord where a journalist could have made the FAs aware etc… but airline peeps today, no way.
Apparently there were Belarussian spies on board as well, so who knows, maybe some special forced dude waved his ID in the FAs face and told her to tell the pilots where to go.
