O raporcie grupy roboczej ICAO
29.07.2022 г.The Republic of Belarus totally disagrees with the conclusions of the final Report of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Fact-Finding Investigation Team (FFIT) on the event involving Ryanair flight, which made an emergency landing in Minsk on 23 May 2021 due to anonymous bomb threats against the aircraft, adopted by the ICAO Council on 18 July 2022.
The FFIT’s Report, like its previous version of 31 January 2022, is still based on incomplete information, as stated in the Report itself. In particular, as before, the Report has no information about the interrogation of the plane’s airliner’s pilots about the reasons for their decision to land in Minsk, while other suitable airports were closer.
Moreover, the FFTI states that there is a lack of due cooperation from certain states, to which requests were sent in the framework of national investigations conducted by a number of countries. The Belarusian side reiterates that so far it has not received a single response to the requests sent within the framework of the national investigation procedure, either from Switzerland (place of registration of the e-mail address, from which messages with threats were sent) or from other countries involved.
Since the release of the version of the Report of 31 January 2022, the FFTI has taken no further action with the Republic of Belarus and no additional information was requested from its authorities.
The use in the Report of an anonymous source, who allegedly is an air traffic controller that worked with Ryanair flight FR4978 on 23 May 2021, to refute the information provided by the official authorities of the Belarus, does not withstand any criticism.
According to the Belarusian authorities, the real air traffic controller who worked with the flight in the summer of 2021 did not show up for work and his exact location is unknown to the employers and authorities. At the same time, his relatives made no requests for his tracing to the Belarusian law enforcement authorities. The written statement of the real air traffic controller was duly forwarded by the Belarusian authorities to ICAO, which was eventually not taken into account by the Team.
The justification of ICAO’s conclusions by the information contained in an alleged audio recording made allegedly by an air traffic controller (in violation of internal workplace procedures – the use of mobile phones in an air traffic controller’s workplace is prohibited), without any technical expertise of the authenticity of the recording and identification of the voices, and without further opportunity for comment by the aviation authorities of the party whose action the anonymous source compromises as planned by the organizers of this fake, discredits the ICAO as an international technical body in the field of civil aviation.
In the current political context of brute force pressure on the legitimate authorities of the Republic of Belarus by the USA, European Union member states and some other countries that joined them by imposing political and economic bans and restrictions on relations with Belarus, including on flights of the Belarusian national air carrier in their airspace, no information from the mentioned countries should be taken for granted and even less be attached to the ICAO materials without a reliable and generally acknowledged confirmation of their authenticity.
The Belarusian side states that the content of the alleged audio recording provided by the US authorities to the Team, allegedly made by the air traffic controller, is a fraud and a forgery, just as the white powder in a test tube in the hands of US Secretary of State C.Powell at one of the UN Security Council meetings in the moment of events related to the US invasion of Iraq was a fraud.
In the absence of other evidence, the alleged audio recording of the air traffic controller’s conversations in the flight control room of Minsk airport has the sole purpose of demonstrating the responsibility of the Belarusian authorities for the incident with Ryanair flight FR4978.
Obviously, the alleged audio recording from the alleged air traffic controller accusing the Belarusian authorities appeared at the most convenient moment to ensure the desired result in the Report: to justify the illegal actions of the US, EU member states and some other countries to restrict the flights of the Belarusian national airline Belavia and thereby violate numerous multilateral and bilateral agreements in the field of civil aviation.
The approach demonstrated by the ICAO Council in the context of the Report is biased, taken under the explicit pressure of a particular group of countries, and calls into question the ability of the organization independently and without external interference to further ensure aviation security in general. It is a clear abuse of ICAO’s mandate.
By accepting such “reports” under pressure from the West, the ICAO violates the right to freedom of movement not only of Belarusian citizens, but also of citizens of all other states, which goes against the fundamental international human rights documents.
The report is replete with mistakes, inaccuracies, non-aviation and biased approaches.
The most obvious of these is that Belarus was accused of allegedly forcing the landing of the aircraft, but at the same time the Team acknowledged that there was no escorting, interception or forcing of the Ryanair plane by a military aircraft in the airspace of Belarus. Consequently, the commander of the foreign aircraft personally made the decision to land at Minsk National Airport, despite the fact that at the time of the decision according to the radar information it was about 90 km to Vilnius airport and approximately 180 km to Minsk National Airport. This decision was taken by the pilot in violation of the Ryanair Aviation Safety Manual, which states that when the “red” signal is declared, the commander of the aircraft must land at the nearest suitable airport (in this situation, the airport was Vilnius).
The practice of double standards and desire to impose only one’s agenda can also be clearly seen in relation to the issue initiated by the Republic of Belarus in the ICAO Council regarding the ineligibility to impose restrictions on the use of airspace and sanctions against the Belarusian air carrier. The refusal to consider this issue demonstrates the undisguised desire of the West to discredit Belarus as a reliable partner in international aviation in order to exclude the Belarusian aviation industry from the international aviation segment through unfair competition.
