Thinking about my SFO-DXB flight on EK tomorrow... I'm travelling on a regular US passport, with, among others, some Israeli stamps in it. The UAE doesn't care about Israeli stamps, so I'm fine there, but thinking about the route I'll be flying, it seems that if the flight had to divert for some reason, I could easily end up in a country that would not appreciate my previous trips to Israel very much.

I'm not really worried about it at all. First of all, the odds of diversion are really low, and even if we did divert, most likely either:

(1) The issue would be fixed without pax leaving the plane, or
(2) They would just hold us in a secure area until EK could send over a replacement plane, without clearing immigration.


Do any of you consider possible diversion locations when planning/preparing travel? I doubt it, but this is FT so someone will probably have something interesting say

I have never considered this but now I am =p
there always seems to be more things to consider every time I fly. I'm sure to forget some of them

Yes but the most common one for me was diverting to Bergen when Shetland was fogged in, so no big deal. One of my guys traveling LAX BNE got diverted to Vanuatu when Brisbane was foggy.

One sometimes hears of planes with many passengers holding third world passports having issues when they must divert. IIRC there was a case at CDG with a plane to India. Most passengers from India had already used single entry EU visas and were not permitted to enter again for an overnight stay while the aircraft was being repaired. As a result, anyone who could enter the EU was sent to a hotel at the airline's expense and the rest--mostly Asians--were forced to spend the night in the terminal.

Sometimes the airline can arrange for some sort of emergency exception to visa rules, but this seems to depend on not only the country where the diversion happens and what their regulations are in these cases but also on the airline's relationship with local authorities and how willing they are to be flexible.

I was on a flight AMS-MSP that did a medical diversion to Canada. What was interesting was that the ill passenger was from South Africa and did not have a visa to enter Canada. Nevertheless she was taken to a hospital in Canada. Her luggage was offloaded too, but it may have been held in bond until she was able to leave Canada rather than being taken through customs without her.

If you travel these routes regularly, renew your passport early when you get a chance because Israel no longer stamps passports (they have a new system).

I had a French colleague years ago (early 80s) who decided to try SU from Paris to Tokyo. Coming back, it was scheduled for a quick stop at SVO and then onward. Unfortunately, there was a problem (I believe MX) and they were stuck there for 24 hours. Given it was the USSR, they were kept in a room with benches and basically told nothing. Afterward, he said while the fare was good, he'd never do that again.

I flew JFK-BEY once and the flight was diverted to AMM because of Israeli military activity in Lebanese airspace. I did not have a Jordanian visa at the time (you had to get the visas in advance back then) and I suspect most of the passengers on the plane did not either. Somehow it was all worked out through the airline and the hotel that the airline put us up in. we were flown to BEY the next day.

is that any different than the cancellation airports at transfer. fra,mxp and muc do lots of cancels in winter. get on a plane in italy in winter. get to muc, and find no continuing flight. the plane from usa did not arrive yesterday. when going to/from vce or bcn, we try to transfer in zhr, vie, geneva, bru.

Don't need to be exotic. There are threads about the treatment of pax on diversions to Eastern Canada on TATL where all pax are kept in a penned areaovernight with no access to food/water and the aircraft provisions can't be used due to agricuture rules.

In the end, unless it's North Korea or somesuch, you face possibly less than luxurious transit arrangements. But, nature of the beast.

School yourself a little by looking up the documentary about how the village of Gander handled the 9/11 diversions then come back and talk about Eastern Canada.

Iran processed an Indian with an Israeli stamp on a diverted US flight and the passenger was provided the same facilities during the diversion on the ground as some other passengers on the flight who had been to Iran with an Iranian visa before.

Your post gave us exotic.

That is not how it goes usually at the Eastern Canada diversion airports.

Indeed, even during the 9/11 diversions, a number of visa nationals spent their time in Canadian detention facilities. Canada is not known for its particularly humane treatment of passengers on diverted flights.

Most airlines will have basic plans in place on how to deal with passenger welfare at diversion airports along their flight path. However, most "situations" that occur during these diversions are due to exception processing (eg. refugee/stateless travel documents, etc...) or authorities failing to exercise effective discretion (eg. denying entry to otherwise inadmissable passengers when the regulations permit entry to be exceptionally granted under certain conditions). In well over 99% of cases, there are no issues for passengers affected by en route international diversions.

That said, the only country that conducts checks on passengers overflying their airspace is the United States. Passengers whose names appear on selected US Government compiled lists may not fly on aircraft that either enter US airspace or that come within a specific radius of US airspace.

Indeed. The Canadian government is sometimes eager to please the US, as it was then, or even meet the USG's ways and then some before and since. That is not how it usually goes.