Transport Canada is investigating how a Russian airline violated that country’s ban on planes from Canadian airspace after a pilot declared a “humanitarian flight”.
Posted at 7:45 a.m.
In a Twitter post late Sunday, the federal body said Aeroflot Flight 111 violated a ban imposed earlier in the day in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
According to flight-tracking website FlightRadar24, Russia’s flagship carrier flight departed for Moscow from Miami International Airport shortly after 3 p.m. ET on Sunday, about six hours after Transportation Minister Omar Alghabra announced the airspace ban.
The European Union also implemented a ban on Russian commercial planes and private planes on Sunday, a move that comes on top of sanctions against Russia’s big banks and members of the country’s financial elite.
Until Sunday, Aeroflot operated several flights a day in Canadian airspace en route to the United States and beyond, but had no flights landing in Canada.
Transport Canada announced it would launch a review of the conduct of Aeroflot and Nav Canada, the not-for-profit corporation that runs the country’s civil air navigation service.
“We will not hesitate to take appropriate enforcement or other action to prevent future violations,” the organization wrote on Twitter.
The transport minister met with Nav Canada CEO Raymond Bohn on Monday to discuss the breach, Alghabra’s spokeswoman Valerie Glazer said.
As the aircraft approached Canadian skies, Nav Canada advised the flight that it should not enter airspace due to the new “Notice to Airmen” — also known as NOTAM — which prohibited “all aircraft owned, chartered or operated… by a person related to Russia. »
“The pilot said he was aware of the NOTAM, but still affirmed his intention to enter Canadian airspace, declaring the status of humanitarian flight,” Nav Canada said in a statement Monday.
The organization stated that it applied the protocols in place, which is to take the humanitarian flight declaration at face value and therefore allow passage to the aircraft in accordance with international civil aviation protocols.
After flight AFL111, two other Russian aircraft taking off from US airports attempted to declare themselves “humanitarian” flights, but were ordered by neighboring air navigation service providers to bypass Canadian airspace, Nav Canada said.