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Just flew from Schipol Airport in the Netherlands to Changi in Singapore. The inflight tracker looked like this:

enter image description here

Clearly there is a direct route over Odesa to Tehran. So why would the flight path go "out of our way" and around the Black Sea?

EDIT: Being from Australia, I didn't realise Odesa is actually in Ukraine, but I will leave the original question as is.

Steve
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In 2014, flight MH17 from Amsterdam, en-route to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down by the Russian military during their clandestine operation in the east of Ukraine. Airlines are very cautious with active war zones since.

Odesa is in Ukraine, and is under frequent military attacks. The flight route from Odesa to Tehran would take the aircraft over Crimea, occupied Ukrainian territory and part of the war zone. Large part of the Black Sea is considered a risk area as well, due to Russian fleet operations.

Furthermore, due to sanctions, western airlines do not fly through Russian airspace.

The routing through Turkey is limited to a few routes, with limited capacity.

The results is the route your flight took. Flight path as shown on flightradar24.com

Note that it avoided Afghanistan as well.

Bianfable
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DeltaLima
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    "due to sanctions, western airlines do not fly through Russian airspace" Not just western airlines. The whole thing with Russia seizing/confiscating leased planes means that a lot of non-western airlines (have to) avoid Russian airspace as well. – Jan Jun 14 '22 at 11:44
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    It might be worth expanding on the point about "limited routes through Turkey", as naïvely it would seem like a plane could fly across the Black Sea from (say) Constanța, Romania to Rize, Turkey and still avoid the war zone. – Michael Seifert Jun 14 '22 at 12:32
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    Also take in account that no overflights over Afghanistan are advisable due to the 'recent' regime change. – cavver Jun 14 '22 at 15:10
  • @MichaelSeifert War zones don’t have rigid boundaries, and one of the belligerents has a long history of shooting down civilian planes, so it’s safest to avoid the entire Black Sea. – StephenS Jun 14 '22 at 16:09
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    @MichaelSeifert they could, and usually prefer to, take that route. The problem is that all flights from Europe to most of Asia want to take that route given the situation. This traffic is in addition to the significant traffic volume between US/Europe and the middle east (Dubai, Doha are major hubs) that funnels through the area as well. As a result there is more demand than capacity on that route. Given the choice of a delay or a slightly longer route, most airlines choose the slightly longer route. – DeltaLima Jun 14 '22 at 17:33
  • Thanks, being from Australia, European geography is not one of my top subjects :P I didn't even realise Odesa is in Ukraine. – Steve Jun 14 '22 at 21:27
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    Exactly @Jan, and Russia could well pull a Lukashenko and send fighter jets up to tell the jetliner to land on a pretense, and then "false alarm, y'all are free to go, here's a train ticket to Kazakhstan, the airplane is ours now" and it becomes spare parts. Literally, Russia changed their internal law so they could seize foreign owned jetliners in country. – Harper - Reinstate Monica Jun 14 '22 at 22:42
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This is from flightradar24.com, just now. UTC 15:09, 14/06/2022 enter image description here

Everyone is avoiding the Black Sea, or at most, only crossing the southern 1/4.

The lone aircraft you see in the middle, circled in red is a USAF Global Hawk (so he doesn't count)

WPNSGuy
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  • Hm, but isn't this view partly so extreme because of limitations with flightradar24's data? Surely there are at least a few Russian planes in the air somewhere around Volgograd, which just aren't captured by Western radar, nor do the Russians provide that information any longer. – leftaroundabout Jun 14 '22 at 22:46
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    @leftaroundabout Zooming out in FR24 still shows a LOT of flights across Russia. Just a big empty hole over Ukraine and slightly East of that. https://www.flightradar24.com/multiview/49.81,29.74/4 – WPNSGuy Jun 14 '22 at 23:14
  • @leftaroundabout, many Russian airports in the north-east part of the map are closed since the war began. – Zeus Jun 15 '22 at 01:24
  • @leftaroundabout pretty much anything in the air there will be (para)military and indeed FR24 probably doesn't have that data (in fact it tends not not have that data for most military flights for most nations). – jwenting Jun 15 '22 at 10:28