Malaysian Airlines said that crashed MH17’s flight plan was approved by Eurocontrol, the air navigation service provider for Europe.
The move comes following criticism for choosing the hostile flight path.
MA said the route over Ukrainian airspace where the incident occurred is commonly used for Europe to Asia flights and a flight from a different carrier (probably an Air India flight carrying the newly elected Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi) was on the same route at the time of the MH17 incident.
In April, the International Civil Aviation Organization identified an area over the Crimean peninsula as risky. MA said, at no point did MH17 fly into, or request to fly into, this area and only flew through airspace approved by the ICAO.
MH17 filed a flight plan requesting to fly at 35,000ft throughout Ukrainian airspace. This is close to the ‘optimum’ altitude.
Upon entering Ukrainian airspace, MH17 was instructed by Ukrainian air traffic control to fly at 33,000ft.
Following this incident, Malaysia Airlines has stopped flying through Ukrainian airspace entirely, flying further south over Turkey.
