The first article in the Times of Israel was that the crew of a Lufthansa flight to Tel Aviv diverted to Cyprus and is now en route back to Munich. The easy read is that it's a battle between the very political pilot's union and the airline -- the hostages to the situation are the passengers who are 80% of the way to their destination (anyway that's what the Israeli newspaper implied)
All this smells like a little fight inside Lufthansa...one tiny winy problem. An hour ago, United and Delta announced that they had cancelled their upcoming flights to Israel.
Airlines cancel operations for two reasons:
(1) Their insurance company tell them to, by deeming a destination a war zone or warlike zone, which greatly reduces the airline's insurance coverage.
(2) Their operations managers on the ground deem the place too dangerous for their flight crews.
People would be surprised how often condition "2" is invoked. However, the quick suspension of US carriers' flights to the country (all this happened in the past 12 hours) tells me that the fundamental problem is insurance. Better to have pissed-off customers than dead ones.
I suspect that in the next 24 hours, other airlines will reach the same conclusion and that commercial air traffic to and from Israel will take a big it until things calm down
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