Originally Posted by
Kacee
It makes absolutely no sense at all. Should flights that skirt the coast of China (i.e., virtually all North American TPACs) also require that all pax have China visas? How about flights that overfly Russia (a high percentage of Europe-Asia flights) - should they also require Russia visas?
The fact is, airlines simply do not take diversions into account in the context of documentation requirements. Typically when an aircraft diverts to an unscheduled country, all pax are maintained in a secure area and do not enter the country, regardless whether they have their passports with them.
On my diverted EWR-DEL last week we were close to the Nordic region and they announced a diversion for a medical emergency, we backtracked about an hour and were told we were going to LHR because of passenger visa issues.... I would guess Copenhagen would have been the closest airport, but I took that to mean that LHR was a better place to rebook all the passengers, which by the fact that it looked like the 777 carried on the next day with maybe 10 pax probably meant they were right....
