Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I have to say, looking out the window today at the Jerusalem skyline, it is hard not to think about the very thing our housemate Daniel sent us a prompt about this morning. It is one of those things you see every day but rarely stop to analyze the deep, complex machinery behind it. From here, I can see the planes banking as they climb away from the coast, and it makes you realize that the sky is not just an open blue expanse. It is a map of invisible walls, historical grudges, and very narrow doors.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. And you are right, Corn. Daniel is a bit of an aviation geek, as he mentioned in his audio note, and he has been watching those flight paths on his phone again. It is a fascinating intersection of high-stakes diplomacy, international law, and the raw physics of getting a metal tube from point A to point B without crossing a line that might get you into a world of trouble. Today is February seventeenth, twenty-twenty-six, and even with all the technological leaps we have made, the geography of the ground still dictates the geometry of the sky.
It really is. The prompt today is all about how international aviation handles geopolitical conflict. Specifically, how do organizations like the International Civil Aviation Organization, or eye-kay-oh as the pros call it, manage things when countries are technically at war or do not recognize each other? Daniel mentioned the specific way flights leave Israel, turning out over the sea to avoid Lebanon or Syria, and he wants to know what happens when things go wrong. Like, what if an Israeli plane has to land in a place like Beirut or Tehran? Or what if a flight with an Israeli passenger on board has to divert to a country that is openly hostile to their state?
It is the ultimate nightmare scenario for a flight dispatcher, but also a triumph of international standardization when it actually works. To understand this, we have to start with the foundation of the whole system, which is the Chicago Convention of nineteen forty-four. This was basically the moment the world sat down, right in the middle of the second world war, and decided that civil aviation needed a universal set of rules if it was going to survive. Fifty-four nations gathered in Chicago while the war was still raging because they knew that once the guns fell silent, the world would be connected by air like never before.
It is kind of wild to think about that timing. Nineteen forty-four. The world is on fire, but people are already thinking about how to make sure a future commercial flight from London to New York does not get shot down because of a paperwork error. It shows a surprising amount of optimism during a very dark time.
Exactly. And the central pillar of that convention, specifically Article One, is the idea of sovereignty. Every nation has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above its territory. That is why you cannot just fly wherever you want. You need permission. But the convention also established eye-kay-oh, which is a specialized agency of the United Nations, to create standards. These are called SARPs, or Standards and Recommended Practices. If every country had different rules for runway lights, radio frequencies, or even the way they measure altitude, international travel would be impossible. So, eye-kay-oh creates this thin layer of cooperation that exists even when the countries involved are at each other's throats. There are nineteen Annexes to the Chicago Convention, covering everything from environmental protection to the transport of dangerous goods.
So let us get into the specifics of what Daniel noticed. If you look at a flight tracking app and watch a plane take off from Ben Gurion Airport, it almost always heads west. It flies out over the Mediterranean Sea, gains altitude, and then makes a sharp turn. Why the sea? Why not just head straight north toward Europe? It seems like a waste of fuel to fly out into the ocean just to turn back.
Well, that is the geopolitical reality of our neighborhood. To the north you have Lebanon, and to the northeast you have Syria. Neither of those countries allows Israeli-registered aircraft, or often any aircraft traveling to or from Israel, to enter their airspace. If a plane just flew straight north from Tel Aviv, it would cross into Lebanese airspace within minutes. In the world of aviation, that is an unauthorized entry into sovereign territory, which can lead to military intercepts. We are talking about fighter jets on your wing. So, the departures out of Ben Gurion follow very specific routes, like the DEENA departure, which funnels traffic out over the Mediterranean.
So the sea is essentially a neutral corridor.
Precisely. There is a specific strip of international airspace over the Mediterranean. Pilots call it a corridor. By heading west first, they ensure they are over international waters before they turn north toward Cyprus or Greece. This is managed by the Nicosia Flight Information Region, or FIR. Once an Israeli flight crosses a certain point in the sea, the Israeli controllers hand them off to the Cypriot controllers. It is a seamless handoff between two countries that have full diplomatic relations. Interestingly, this changed a bit with the Abraham Accords in twenty-twenty. Suddenly, Saudi Arabian airspace opened up for flights to and from Israel, which was a massive shift. It shortened flights to Dubai and India by hours. But toward the north and east, those walls are still very much in place. Even in twenty-twenty-six, despite various regional shifts, the northern route remains a total no-go zone for Israeli carriers.
Okay, so the "what" is clear. We fly over the water to stay safe. But Daniel's prompt goes deeper. He asked about the protocols for emergency diversions into hostile territories. This is where it gets really tense. If you are on an El Al flight and an engine fails right as you are near the border, or if there is a smoke-in-the-cockpit emergency that cannot wait, what is the rule? Does the pilot have to choose between a crash and a hostile landing?
This is where the eye-kay-oh rules get very serious. Under international law, specifically Annex twelve of the Chicago Convention, every member state has an obligation to provide assistance to an aircraft in distress. This is known as the duty of care. Even if two countries do not have diplomatic relations, even if they are technically in a state of conflict, the humanitarian necessity of saving lives is supposed to override the political situation. When a pilot declares a Mayday, they are essentially invoking a universal law that supersedes national borders.
That sounds great on paper, Herman, but we know the world is messier than a nineteen forty-four treaty. If a pilot radios Beirut tower and says, "I have a fire on board and I need to land," what actually happens in that tower? Do they really just say "Welcome, clear to land"?
It is a high-pressure hand-off. Usually, the pilot would be talking to an intermediate controller, maybe in Cyprus or Jordan. If the emergency is dire, the pilot declares a Mayday. Once a Mayday is declared, the pilot has the ultimate authority to do whatever is necessary to land the plane safely. This is enshrined in eye-kay-oh Annex two, the Rules of the Air. If that means entering hostile airspace, they do it. The air traffic controllers in the "hostile" country are trained professionals. In almost every recorded case in modern history, the controllers prioritize the safety of the flight. They will give the plane a path to the runway. They are not looking to cause a disaster on their own soil. Think about the paperwork and the international condemnation if a country refused a landing to a burning plane and it crashed into a residential neighborhood in their own capital.
But what about the aftermath? The plane lands, the fire is put out, and now you have an Israeli aircraft and a hundred passengers sitting on the tarmac in a country that does not recognize their state. That is a diplomatic bomb.
It is, and there are "back-channel" protocols for exactly this. Usually, a third party gets involved immediately. Often it is the Swiss Embassy, which frequently acts as a diplomatic bridge between countries like the United States and Iran. Or it might be the International Red Cross. We have seen real-world examples of this. Back in August of twenty-twenty-three, an Arkia flight from the Seychelles to Tel Aviv had to make an emergency landing in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, due to a technical issue. At the time, there were no formal diplomatic ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
I remember that. People were worried about how the passengers would be treated.
And the result was actually a masterclass in aviation professionalism. The Saudi authorities welcomed the passengers, put them up in a hotel at the airport, and even sent a replacement plane to get them home the next day. The Israeli Prime Minister even released a video thanking the Saudi authorities. It showed that when it comes to the safety of life at sea or in the air, the "old rules" of humanity usually win. However, it is not always that smooth. In June of twenty-twenty-four, an El Al flight from Warsaw to Tel Aviv had to divert to Antalya, Turkey, because of a medical emergency. While Turkey and Israel have relations, they were very strained at the time. The Turkish ground crews reportedly refused to refuel the plane, and the flight eventually had to take off and fly to Greece to refuel before heading to Israel. So, while the "landing" is usually guaranteed, the "service" on the ground can become a political tool.
That brings up the other part of Daniel's question, which I find really interesting. The passenger manifest. If you are a pilot and you are looking at your screens, and you realize you have to divert, do you look at who is on board before you pick an airport? Like, if you have a high-ranking government official or someone who might be at particular risk in a certain country, does that change the decision?
This is a point of real debate in flight decks. The official rule is "nearest suitable airport." "Nearest" is obvious. "Suitable" is the tricky part. Suitable means a runway long enough for your aircraft, the right fuel, the right emergency equipment, and favorable weather. In a true, time-critical emergency, like a cabin fire or a total hydraulic failure, "suitable" means the first piece of flat concrete you can find. You do not check the manifest. You land. Because if you do not land in five minutes, everyone dies regardless of their nationality.
Right, safety of flight comes first. But what if it is a "slow" emergency? Like a cracked windshield or a single engine failure on a three-engine plane where you can stay in the air for another hour?
In those cases, the flight crew and the airline's dispatch center absolutely take the geopolitical situation into account. They use what they call "risk-based routing." If they can make it to a "friendly" airport by flying an extra thirty minutes, they will almost always choose that over a closer, "hostile" one. They have these lists of "preferred diversion airports." For a flight departing Israel, the dispatchers have already mapped out where they would go at every point along the route. They are not making these choices from scratch in the moment. They have a pre-calculated "Escape Maneuver" for every segment of the flight.
So they do not necessarily scroll through the names of all two hundred passengers, but they know the general risk profile.
Exactly. And for certain airlines, like El Al, there are even stricter protocols. They have security personnel who are part of that decision-making process. They are very aware that an Israeli flag on the tail makes the plane a different kind of target than, say, a neutral European carrier. But even for a neutral carrier, if they have dual-nationals or Israelis on board, the airline has a duty to protect them. There was a case where a flight diverted to Iran due to a technical issue, and the airline actually worked with the local authorities to ensure no one had to go through passport control. They kept them in a "sterile" zone of the terminal. The key is that as long as the passengers stay "airside"—meaning they do not officially enter the country through immigration—the legal complications are minimized.
It is amazing that the system holds up. But I wonder about the technical side of this "cooperation." Daniel mentioned the red and white paint and the taxiway signs. Does eye-kay-oh actually send inspectors to places like North Korea or Syria to make sure their signs are the right shade of red?
They do. It is one of the most effective, if least talked about, parts of the United Nations. Eye-kay-oh has what they call the Universal Safety Oversight Audit Program, or USOAP. They send teams all over the world to check that countries are following the standards laid out in Annex fourteen, which covers Aerodromes. This includes the exact dimensions of runway markings, the intensity of the lights, and even the "frangibility" of signs—meaning they have to break easily if a plane hits them. If a country fails to meet these standards, eye-kay-oh can essentially "flag" them, which tells every other airline in the world, "Hey, it is not safe to fly here." That is a massive economic blow. So even the most isolated regimes usually try to follow the eye-kay-oh rules because they want their own national airline to be able to fly internationally.
It is like a global club where the membership fee is just following the manual.
That is a perfect way to put it. And that manual is incredibly detailed. It covers everything from the exact frequency of emergency beacons to the way a pilot says the word "five." They say "fife" because "five" can sound like "fire" over a static-filled radio. They say "niner" because "nine" can sound like "nein," the German word for no. This level of extreme standardization is what allows a pilot from Brazil to land in Japan without ever having met the controller. They are speaking the same technical language, using the same PAPI lights—that is Precision Approach Path Indicator—to tell if they are too high or too low on the glide slope.
Let us go back to the "hostile territory" scenario for a second. We talked about a plane landing in a country it has no relations with. But what about the opposite? What about a flight from a "hostile" country that needs to land here in Israel? Say, a flight from a nation we do not have ties with is crossing the Mediterranean and has a medical emergency.
It works exactly the same way in reverse. Israel is a signatory to the Chicago Convention. If an aircraft calls Mayday, Ben Gurion Airport will clear the way. We have actually seen this happen over the years with various private or charter flights. The priority is the human life on board. The security forces will obviously meet the plane, and there will be a lot of phone calls made to various embassies, but the landing itself is handled with the same professionalism as any other. The controllers at Ben Gurion are not looking at the flag on the tail when a pilot says they have a heart attack on board. They are looking at the radar blip and the distance to the runway.
It is a bit of a paradox, is it not? On the ground, we have these borders, walls, and deeply entrenched conflicts. But thirty thousand feet up, there is this invisible grid of cooperation that almost never breaks.
It is one of the few places where "globalism" actually functions as intended. And it has to, because the alternative is just too dangerous. If you start politicizing air traffic control, you end up with mid-air collisions. The laws of physics do not care about your passport. If two planes are on a collision course, the only thing that matters is that both pilots and both controllers are following the same eye-kay-oh protocol for "resolution advisories." This is handled by a system called TCAS, or Traffic Collision Avoidance System. It does not care about the nationality of the pilots; it just tells one to climb and the other to descend.
You mentioned something earlier about "Notice to Air Missions," or NOTAMs. How do those play into this? I have heard they are like the "Twitter of the sky" for pilots.
That is a great analogy. NOTAMs are the way the system handles the "messiness" of the real world in real-time. If a country is having a military exercise, or if a missile is being tested, or if a specific piece of airspace is closed because of a conflict, they issue a NOTAM. Pilots and dispatchers check these before every single flight. If you look at the NOTAMs for the Middle East right now, in early twenty-twenty-six, they are full of warnings. "Avoid this sector," "Do not fly below thirty thousand feet here," "Be aware of potential GPS interference in this area."
GPS interference is a big one lately, right? We have been feeling that even here on the ground in Jerusalem. My map thinks I am in Beirut half the time.
Exactly. That is a form of electronic warfare that bleeds into civil aviation. It is called GPS spoofing or jamming. It became a massive issue in twenty-twenty-four and twenty-twenty-five, especially in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. And eye-kay-oh is currently scrambling to figure out how to standardize the response to that. Because if a pilot cannot trust their GPS, they have to go back to older forms of navigation, like ground-based radio beacons—VORs—or even inertial navigation systems that use gyroscopes to track movement. This is where the standardization Daniel noticed becomes a lifesaver. If the digital systems fail, those red and white signs and those ground beacons are the only things left.
So, if we look at the big picture for Daniel, the reason his flight turns out over the sea is a mix of respecting sovereignty and managing risk. But if that flight ever had to go "off-script" because of an emergency, there is a massive, invisible safety net made of eighty-two years of treaties and technical manuals waiting to catch it.
And it is a safety net that is constantly being patched and updated. Every time there is a "near miss" or a diplomatic incident involving a flight, eye-kay-oh gathers the data and tries to turn it into a new "recommended practice." It is a slow, bureaucratic process, but it is one of the reasons that flying remains the safest way to travel, even in the most volatile parts of the world. The system is designed to be "politically blind." It treats every aircraft as a collection of souls rather than a political statement.
I think one of the most fascinating takeaways here is the "suitable airport" definition. It really highlights the weight a pilot carries. They are not just flying a machine; they are making real-time ethical and political calculations. "Is this engine vibrating enough that I should risk landing in a hostile country, or can I nurse it for another two hundred miles to a friendly one?" That is a heavy burden.
It is. And most pilots will tell you that they have a "mental line" in the sand. If the plane is going to stay in the air, they keep going to a preferred destination. If the plane might fall out of the sky, the politics disappear. There is a famous saying in aviation: "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate." Fly the plane first. Everything else, including the diplomatic fallout and the passenger manifest, comes third. The pilot's primary legal and moral obligation is the safety of the aircraft.
It is a good reminder that despite all our divisions, there are these systems we have built that prioritize our shared humanity, or at least our shared desire not to crash. It is a very pragmatic kind of peace. It is not built on everyone liking each other; it is built on the fact that we all use the same sky.
It really is. And for our listeners, next time you are on a flight and you see those weird turns on the map, or you notice those standardized signs on the taxiway, just remember that you are looking at the result of thousands of people from nearly every country on Earth deciding to agree on something. It is a rare thing to see such total global consensus on anything, but in aviation, it is the only way to fly.
On that note, I think we have given Daniel a lot to chew on for his next flight out of Ben Gurion. If you are listening and you have noticed something "weird" about the way the world works, or if you have a question about the hidden systems that keep things running, we want to hear from you. Head over to myweirdprompts.com and use the contact form to send us your ideas.
And if you are enjoying our deep dives into these topics, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your podcast app or a rating on Spotify. It genuinely helps the show reach more people who are as curious as we are. We are aiming to hit three thousand reviews by the end of the year, so every bit helps.
It really does. This has been My Weird Prompts. We are available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and at myweirdprompts.com. Thanks for joining us on this journey through the clouds.
Until next time, keep looking up.
Goodbye everyone.
