In a global exclusive AirlineRatings.com has been given special access to flight operations of Air Baltic avoiding Ukrainian airspace.
The Ukraine war has confronted industry-leading regional carrier Air Baltic, based in Riga, with new challenges.
Its home country borders directly on Russia, and the Baltic states have seen themselves as being under threat from Russia for a long time, mostly falling on deaf ears in the West before the current war started.
Now, the airline’s biggest task is to communicate that its operations continue to run like clockwork.
SEE: Thousands watching US and UK spy planes over Ukraine.
“Western media have presented the Baltics as being in or near a war zone, we need to emphasize that Latvia is not sharing a border with Ukraine,” Air Baltic CEO Martin Gauss stated in recent interviews.
“We are a free country, undisrupted,” he assured.
AirlineRatings.com was given special cockpit access on a flight to see how the airline is navigating around the challenges of the Ukrainian situation.
The second-longest scheduled passenger flight worldwide on the Airbus A220 is Air Baltic’s service from Riga to Dubai, and it has been heavily impacted by the new restrictions, especially on the return from the Persian Gulf.
Usually, this flight takes about six hours, while now, new records are broken: As data provided by flightaware.com show, on March 8, 2022, flight BT792 from Dubai to Riga stayed aloft for an unprecedented seven hours and 51 minutes.
“The route currently incurs on average 40 minutes of detours both ways, and once you have strong headwinds, it can be even close to eight hours in total,” Air Baltic chief pilot Gerhard Ramcke tells Airlineratings.com
The route has fundamentally changed since war broke out: Before, the flight to Dubai turned straight into Russian airspace shortly after takeoff in Riga, then passed east of the Black Sea over Georgia, Armenia and finally Iran directly into Dubai.
Now, after a substantial rerouting, it leads over Lithuania, Poland, the Slovak Republic, Hungary and Romania over the Black Sea into Turkey and then on via Iran to Dubai.
“With Belarus, Ukraine and Russia plus the Kaliningrad airspace, a huge area we normally use is inaccessible now,” says the chief pilot. “Besides the detours and the resulting higher amount of fuel burnt, our whole Russia and Ukraine business has broken away, before we flew to Kyiv, Odesa, Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg and Moscow.”
According to data provider Cirium, however, these markets represented just seven per cent of the capacity Air Baltic was planning for February.
“Lviv was supposed to come online as a new destination this summer,” reports Gerhard Ramcke, “these are all sources of income that disappeared, also given the fact that passengers originating from these markets wouldn’t have just flown to Riga, but also further west with us.”
Airlineratings.com recently joined Gerhard Ramcke in the cockpit on a scheduled flight out of Riga to witness the new operational environment.
Flight BT761 from Riga to Tenerife happens to be the world’s longest scheduled Airbus A220 flight. Since war broke out, all aircraft on a southerly course have to swerve slightly to the southeast.
“We are not allowed to overfly the Russia-administered airspace of their exclave Kaliningrad, resulting in a detour of 50 to 80 km,” explains Captain Ramcke. “Usually we would have passed very close to Kaliningrad.”
Even on the only slightly affected flight to Tenerife, 300 kg of extra fuel has been put on board. “We are taking on more fuel as there are some uncertainties,” explains Ramcke.
“On the way out of Riga through the so-called Suvalki corridor, at the entry into Polish airspace, there is a NATO airfield where we sometimes encounter aircraft taking off to intercept Russian jets.
“For us, that means we might face sudden airspace restrictions and have to fly lower or initiate descent earlier” – leading to higher fuel burn. But that is currently by far not the only problem.
“Near Kaliningrad airspace, we face more and more cases of GPS jamming,” reports Ramcke, something EASA has recently issued a warning about. “It’s not posing big difficulties for us as we can then rely on other navigational means, but they lack the same precision. We get a small message here on the display and have to switch modes, that happens time and again and is a symbol for the frictions there,” he cautiously describes the situation.
Airline pilots have to be prepared for a very different kind of uncertainty over Eastern Europe: “We have repeatedly had moments of surprise when military aircraft, sometimes a whole group with their own air-to-air tankers, appear out of nowhere and we suddenly see them. They have their transponders switched off and therefore we can’t detect them on our TCAS collision avoidance radar. They have their own system and are able to see us, but we can’t see them,” reports Air Baltic’s chief pilot.
“We rely on that, and so far there were no major conflicts.”
