LONDON: Up until about 0630 UTC on Feb. 28, air traffic over the Gulf and the wider region was operating normally.
The usual streams of aircraft heading to and from Asia were converging over the Strait of Hormuz, joining or leaving the conveyor belt of jets travelling along the waterway between Iran and the Gulf states.
As usual, some of the stream peeled off to head west for Riyadh and Jeddah, while aircraft bound for Europe carried on along the well-worn two-way aerial highway, passing over Iraq and Turkey.
Iranian airspace was busy, too, with large numbers of aircraft heading to and from destinations across eastern Europe.
Unnoticed at the time in the general clutter, a lone US Air Force Boeing KC-135R Stratotanker, an air-to-air refueling aircraft, was in a holding pattern over the Mediterranean island of Crete.
