‘The first thing is: Where are we? And how much fuel have we got and where do we need to go?’, Australian veteran pilot says
Keith Tonkin has flown a Boeing 747 towards airspace where missiles were being fired, and knows the pressure pilots have been under this week.
“You’re stuck in that airplane until you land safely,” the veteran Australian pilot says.
Amid the expanding war in Iran – with missiles piercing the skies over the Middle East – pilots’ regimented routes have been thrown into chaos. They’ve been forced to turn planes around mid-flight or squeeze into narrowing air corridors, with hundreds of lives in their hands.
“They’ll be seeing more aeroplanes around them than they would have experienced in the past,” Tonkin says of the commercial pilots affected by conflict.
