A Brazilian commander, already known for his videos posted on a YouTube channel, returned to comment on his routine in the sky, and this time he raised the issue of flying near Ukraine amid the ongoing war.
Pilot of large aircraft at an airline in Far East Asia, in the video below Rafael Santos, creator of the channel “Teaching For Free”, talks about how flights between Asia and Europe were during this period when many companies avoid overflying for safety reasons of Russian airspace, which used to be widely used in this context.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tHKiS7bzk
Santos explains that the flight time was about an hour to an hour and a half longer, having to fly through southern Russia and Ukraine to pass a route via North Africa and Turkey to get to Europe.
And besides the diversion, pilots still face the situation of resorting to old means of flight navigation, since the planes lose their GPS signal when passing near Ukraine and the Black Sea.
“If you approach Ukrainian airspace or the Black Sea because they are on war mission there, the GPS signals will be blocked. I think it’s because of those missiles, those things that use GPS to orient themselves. So you have a jammer, a GPS blocker,” Santos describes.
He explains that the European Aviation Administration (EASA) is aware of this and is issuing information on where pilots need to deal with the missing signal and the airline has a specific procedure for doing so.
“I just took a flight that passed near the Black Sea, cut through a small corner of the Black Sea down there, bordered on the coast of Russia, passed near Ukrainian airspace, and the GPS was blocked for a long time a couple of 15 to 20 minutes,” says the pilot.
On this route, they only navigated through the inertial system and adjusted the aircraft’s position using radio signals and no longer satellite signals.
“It’s like flying in the old days, without the millimeter accuracy of GPS. Is it the right thing? Not. Does it affect the flight, with risk, these things? Not to. This is an emergency procedure only. You lose that fine tuning that the GPS gives for a moment, for a period of time, and you do it manually like it used to be,” explains Santos.
In addition, some other functions of the aircraft that depend on the GPS signal are also out of order, but without affecting flight safety.
Flight times have increased not only on this route, but also on operations across the Pacific Ocean connecting Asia with the United States, which used to fly through Russian airspace but now stay over the ocean and Japanese airspace. .
Thus, in addition to the longer route, the plane faces strong headwinds in one of the directions of the route, which were avoided with the possibility of overflying Russia.
“It’s a contradictory airspace, a wartime airspace. You can’t even get close. People are terribly careful not to enter Russian airspace detours in the first place. Even if we are eligible, we do not board for safety reasons and because the airspace is closed to Koreanregistered aircraft, which is my case,” the pilot describes.
He concludes: “In short, we fly further, spend more time, use more kerosene and, unfortunately, pollute more. In fact, war is an unfortunate situation, a crazy thing that ends up affecting everyone, whether we want to be close or not. Look at the price of oil there, the price of gas at the pump.”