The airlines still flying just miles from where a plane was shot from the sky

Airlines including British Airways and Virgin Atlantic continue to fly a matter of miles from the GPS-jammed Russian region where an Azerbaijan Airlines plane was hit by suspected air defence missiles on Christmas Day.

On December 25, an Azerbaijan Airlines flight took off from Baku, Azerbaijan, en route to Grozny, the capital of Chechnya in southern Russia. An initial Azerbaijan investigation found that the plane suffered GPS jamming before being struck by suspected Russian air defences (surviving passengers reported three blasts while coming in to land at Grozny) and crash-landing 280 miles away in Aktau, Kazakhstan.

Of the 67 people on board, 38 died, including both pilots and a flight attendant; 29 people survived with injuries. In a phone call with Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev, Vladimir Putin expressed regret for the incident but stopped short of acknowledging responsibility.

The incident has drawn parallels with the MH17 disaster of July 2014, when a Malaysian Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down by a surface-to-air missile in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people onboard. In January 2020, a Ukrainian International Airlines flight PS752 from Tehran to Kyiv was inadvertently shot down by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, killing 176 people. Missile strikes on commercial planes are now a leading cause of aviation deaths, according to the Flight Safety Foundation’s Aviation Safety Network.

Just two weeks after the Azerbaijan Airlines disaster, data from FlightRadar24 shows that every day, many hundreds of planes continue to navigate the Caucasus Mountain flight path bordering Chechnya, and fly less than 50 miles from the crash site, exposing in real time the tangled complexities of long-haul air traffic navigation in 2025.

How the Caucasus Mountain corridor emerged

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, western airlines have been banned from flying over the world’s biggest country. And with military activity ramping up in the Middle East, a number of countries (Iran, Syria and Yemen) are now deemed too dangerous to fly over, while others (Israel and Lebanon) are suffering intermittent airspace closures due to military activity.

The result is that pilots flying between Europe and Asia have been squeezed into three narrow flight corridors. The southerly route passes across the Mediterranean and Egypt before cutting across Saudi Arabia towards the UAE. A central route cuts across Turkey before making a southerly routing above Iraq. The northerly route has emerged as the favoured of the three, running through northern Turkey, across the Black Sea into Georgia, Azerbaijan, across the Caspian Sea and beyond.

The northern corridor has been favoured, in part, because it was the farthest away from missiles being launched between Israel and Iran, or the rockets being fired by Yemeni Houthi rebels in the Red Sea. However, Ukraine has ramped up drone attacks in southern Russia in recent weeks, and following the recent tragedy involving the Azerbaijan Airlines aircraft and reports of GPS jamming, this northern corridor is under increased scrutiny.

How close are airlines flying to where the incident occurred?

The section of the northerly corridor passing through Georgia and Azerbaijan shares a border with the Grozny air traffic control zone. It is in this area that the Azerbaijan Airlines plane is reported to have been struck by Russian air defence missiles, according to the preliminary findings of an Azerbaijan investigation.

There has been no change to commercial air traffic routing since the incident. David Mumford of OpsGroup, an organisation for pilots and air traffic controllers, told The Telegraph that there’s still “plenty of traffic” in the region, while Ian Petchenik of FlightRadar24 said: “We’ve seen no change in routing of transit flights along the northern corridor. And I’ve not seen any new warnings.”

To give an example: on January 2, using the aircraft tracking website FlightRadar24, The Telegraph monitored a British Airways flight (BAW168) from Delhi to Heathrow. The aircraft flew less than 50 miles south of Aktau in Kazakhstan, where the Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash-landed. It then tracked a flight path approximately 20 miles from Russian airspace above the Caspian Sea, before entering the congested corridor towards Georgia and Turkey, south of the Caucasus Mountains.

Lufthansa, Virgin Atlantic and Iberia were among the other airlines seen following the northern corridor on January 2. A spokesman for Virgin Atlantic confirmed that there have been no recent changes to their routings. They said: “Our flight routings are subject to continual security assessment and operate in line with UK, US and local regulations.” The Telegraph awaits a response from British Airways.

John Strickland, an air transport consultant, stressed that the route would be under close assessment by international aviation bodies: “Airlines take continuous security briefings, both in house and from government and industry bodies. Concerted efforts to improve rapid and reliable information were stepped up by UN agency ICAO following the shooting down of the MH17 over Ukraine. Current geopolitical challenges are so great for commercial air traffic that this is of necessity work in continuous progress,” he said.

Canada has a medium risk notice for airlines flying through Azerbaijan airspace, in place since September 2022. Transport Canada cites: “Potential risk from anti-aviation weaponry and military activity along the border of Armenia and Azerbaijan.” The website Safe Airspace, run by Opsgroup, says the primary risk of flying over Azerbaijan is: “From any further large-scale ceasefire violations involving missiles or anti-aircraft weaponry, which may present a risk to overflights in the border region [with Armenia].”

Concerns around GPS jamming

A notable subplot of the Azerbaijan Airlines disaster was that the cockpit lost signal due to suspected GPS jamming in the lead-up to the disaster. In March 2024, a pilot revealed to The Telegraph that commercial airline GPS systems are routinely “jammed” by military powers, including the Russians. Pilots have experienced satellite and communication blackouts triggering warning alerts, a problem which has become particularly prevalent over the eastern Mediterranean.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the commercial pilot, who works for a leading airline, said in March: “Every flight I operate across northern Turkey and into Iraq – essentially along the Russian and Iranian borders – now has GPS interference.

“Aircraft systems alert us when something isn’t working. We often get numerous alerts in the space of a couple of hours. It’s been like that for around a year now. The GPS interference spoofs the aircraft into not knowing its location. Thankfully, we have other systems to mitigate this issue.

“Depending on the aircraft, this issue can take away some of the pilot’s visual situational awareness (from the screens), especially with regard to the terrain.”

Daily data published by FlightRadar24 shows all of the regions around the world where GPS jamming has been logged, and it consistently indicates high interference around Russia’s western borders with Baltic states, plus across the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountain range in which the Azerbaijan Airlines incident occurred. GPS jamming is not typically the result of hostile action with a view of disrupting air traffic, but rather an unintended consequence of military defence radio systems.

Airlines take every precaution to ensure passenger safety. But the skies are getting smaller, and flying through war-torn regions involves some degree of risk. Countries such as Iraq, for example, can be flown over, but only at a recommended altitude of 32,000ft or higher, advises the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), due to the risk posed to civil aircraft below that level.

The fact that the northern corridor – bordering missile-scarred Chechnya, in a zone where GPS jamming is rife, and where a passenger jet recently crash-landed in still unconfirmed circumstances – remains such a busy route is a fascinating case study into the calculated risks airlines must take in the modern era.