Yesterday I told you about a pretty interesting predicament: American Airlines flights to Asia were avoiding Russian airspace, resulting in tech stops at LAX and some severely delayed flights.
I’m happy to report that what many feared would be a lengthy issue has now been resolved, at least for today. American Airlines flight 125 (DFW-HKG nonstop) has departed DFW Airport and has filed a flight plan over Russian airspace with no tech stop at LAX.
As always, pay attention to your reservations as the tensions between the US and Russia over the Syria strikes work themselves out but it appears things are back to normal for now.
Why did everything change so quickly?
Who knows. Countries charge to overfly their airspace, and Russia is the largest country in the world, so it logically would follow they make lots of money from selling overflight rights and wanted to protect that revenue stream. American may have made this move out of an abundance of caution based on what they were hearing from the government liaisons at the time and what they feared never came to fruition.
Ultimately what’s the lesson to learn from this?
Airline politics are weird. Oh, also it’s a really good idea to “garden” your reservations, as Gary Leff puts it. Check on your flights every so often to see if any schedule changes happened and do so once a day or so as the flight approaches.
