WaPo: U.S. Officials Scrambled to Nab Snowden ("Decision to Force a Foreign Leader’s Plane to Land")

[intaglio]

97. I did that last year

The fuel gauge problem is well recorded in all the media as was the fact that it was only the amended flight plan that was refused.

Normal ATC procedure does not allow aircraft to take off (in Europe) without a filed and pre-approved flight plan with the possible exception of certain military flights - if the approvals are not there it does not take off. Unfortunately I cannot link to my brother-in-law who was a commercial pilot but the CAA has the rules. It is utterly essential to do this in Europe because of restricted flying space the more so during holiday periods.

Reporting a non-critical malfunction requires the aircraft to amend the flight plan, which the pilot did, but amended flight plans have to have new approval for overflight because of congestion. For whatever reasons three countries refused that permission. By report, France because someone wanted to contact the French Foreign Ministry, Italy and Spain because they could not confirm the new flight plan did not conflict with scheduled flights. This was later reporting and got kind of lost in the melee.

Later reporting from Austria showed the search was exactly as described - a walk through - and again b.i.l. found out that this is a standard request complicated in this case by the fact it was a diplomatic flight. Because it was a diplomatic flight even if Snowden had been on board he could not have been removed by force.

The aircraft used had to make a stop prior to flying the Atlantic because few aircraft if any have the capacity to make it all the way from Moscow to Bolivia. Because Spain is an ally of the USA there was no need to force the aircraft down.