A pilot always has the right—for safety reasons—to make the decision to accept a routing. If the controller is not able to give the pilot a routing he likes, the pilot may declare an emergency, which in most cases will force the routing he wants onto the air traffic control system. Outside of an emergency, a civilian pilot may not stray into restricted airspace without approval of air traffic control.
If the routing in a pilot-declared emergency takes the pilot into restricted areas or where other traffic may be a problem, the controller will apprise the pilot of that if at all possible, and reroute the other traffic as needed and if possible.
I believe part of the controversy is that some deem ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) should have declared the eastern Ukraine restricted airspace, through which no controller would then give a civilian craft clearance, except related to an emergency.
If a pilot crosses into forbidden airspace, fighters from the transgressed country may be scrambled to accompany the flight and make whatever demands of the pilot their military/government deems appropriate.
In more peaceful scenarios, diplomats will be left to work through the details of transgressed airspace. In more belligerent cases, guns and missiles may determine the outcome.
If the rebels shot down MH17 (without further complication), whoever they organizationally are should be shouldering the burden of compensation to the victims. If they’re paper-thin proxies for Russia, those “chickens may come home to roost.” To the extent the possible proxy question comes clear through this situation, I think the world will welcome that aspect.
HF
Thanks, very informative.
Since some countries were avoiding flying over the Ukraine by flying south around it, it would be interesting to explore who made the decision to route MH17 over land. I’ve heard a lot of contradictory stories whose truth I can’t evaluate—that the route was chosen to minimize fuel costs; that it was assigned by controllers in Kiev; and finally, that someone had looked up a few weeks of back data on FlightStats for prior runs of MH17 and found that almost all of them went south over water.
However, for some reason he accepted it. Perhaps to save $1500 worth of fuel. Or there was something else.
it is getting interesting by the day.
New development: another shadow of KAL007.
Ruskies today claimed (and have evidence) that U.S. spy satellite flew overhead at the very time MH17 being shot down and ask from U.S. to release the photos and electronic other records of the shootdown. Ouch.
They also claim that Ukrainian SU-25 was shadowing MH17 at a distance of 3 nm.