I am flying from San Francisco to Shanghai next week and noticed this interesting flight route for United’s flight yesterday.
It appears that flight is diverting to avoid travelling over North Korea, although it seems odd it doesn’t go West rather than East.
Maybe the plane isn’t equipped with over-water thingies
It’s not only avoiding North Korea, it’s avoiding certain areas of mainland China. My wife and I live in Hong Kong and often fly to Shanghai and Beijing, and there are narrow corridors cleared for commercial traffic with the rest being reserved for military. Many times had a bumpy flight and been told by the pilot that not much they can do about it since they’re locked into the flightpath.
That’s odd, going all the way to Japan since they weren’t avoiding flying over China (as it sometimes happens). Looks like it flew almost to KIX before continuing towards Seoul and then to PVG…
This looks like an error in the flight tracking of the site you used.
They do avoid NK, but not like that.
I’ve flown in and out of Korea (heading to the US or Japan) numerous times and have not once overflown North Korea.
Sometimes these flight trackers do weird things. This was my flight from CDG-DXB, showing a complete 180deg turn around…we never turned around and even showed up 30 mins early: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/AFR3830/history/20130207/1235Z/LFPG/OMDB.
Maybe something wrong with the flight tracking program.
I have noticed the same thing on SQ flights between SFO and ICN. Sometimes we cross over North Korea and sometimes we don’t.