Diversionary tactics: flights are normally re-routed for the best of reasons

The cartoon shows a Ryanair check-in agent telling a passenger: “And there’s the extra charge for not being kidnapped.”

The quip, in Tuesday’s Metro newspaper, is one of many that have followed Sunday’s extraordinary forced landing in Minsk of a Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius.

The circumstances were grave: more than 100 passengers and crew were placed in harm’s way by the government of Belarus as its security forces set about apprehending a dissident journalist, Roman Protasevich. The fact the act of air piracy involved an airline often mocked for its pricing policies and extravagant interpretation of geography inevitably led to some mirth – as well as spreading concern among passengers of a possible repeat.

Yet many times each year, a pilot will announce: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are diverting.” Normally it will be for compelling reasons, and may even turn into an adventure.

Without wishing to add to the “Ryanair never lands where you expect anyway” trope, I will mention two diversions I experienced to the wrong countries while on Ryanair flights. Both were early morning trips from Stansted to Baden Baden in Germany, or at least that was what it said on my ticket.

The former US airport base is right beside the Rhine and prone to fog. On one occasion the pilot headed for Strasbourg, just 26 miles as the Boeing 737 flies on the French side of the river. On the other, we flew south to Basel – which unusually allows passengers to choose to leave the airport into one of two countries, neither of which is Germany: I chose Switzerland over France.

Both were handled professionally with passengers kept informed.

Poor visibility was a better excuse than the operational foul-up that surrounded my weirdest diversion: the Emirates flight from Dubai to Heathrow landed normally, though an hour late.

We were held on the ground short of the terminal for an age before the embarrassed captain announced he should have been told to divert to Gatwick. Duty staff had calculated that the late arrival would mean the departure back to Dubai would fall foul of the Heathrow curfew, and had decided to move the passengers to Gatwick. Unfortunately no one told the captain.

The plane refuelled for the 15-minute flight to the Sussex airport – where we discovered a disabled Thomas Cook Airlines plane blocking the runway. Eventually it was cleared and we landed several hours late, at the wrong airport. I later learnt we were two minutes away from re-diverting to Manchester.

There was never any danger on these detours. But many diversions are carried out “right now”, which has its own acronym among some pilots: “RFN”.

The cause is usually either a medical emergency or a suspected fire.

Fear of fire triggered two widely reported diversions. In 2006 a British Airways Boeing 747 landed at Uralsk in Kazakhstan, on an emergency-only runway after a fire indication. The plane could not take off again with passengers and bags on board, so three Airbus A320s were sent out to fetch them.

Three years ago, an Air France plane was nearing the end of a Paris-Shanghai flight when a crew member reported fumes. The nearest available airport was Irkutsk, a fascinating city in eastern Siberia. Unfortunately none of the passengers got to see much of it: almost all of them were ineligible for admission to Russia because they had no visas. So they were kept under guard in hotels.

The first replacement Boeing 777 despatched from Paris itself “went tech”, and by the time a fully functioning jet arrived and they had made the final three-hour hop to Shanghai the passengers were almost three days late. But they were safe, and had a story to tell.

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