Belavia cancels flights to Simferopol

Belavia, the national airline company, has cancelled flights to Simferopol.

BelaPAN has learnt it from the company's information service.

Asked when the company began to sell tickets to Simferopol, which were usually sold in summer, Belavia's representative said: “They [the flights] were cancelled. We don't sell tickets and operate flights at the moment.”

It became known on April 2 that the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation (Eurocontrol) banned flights to Crimea, namely to Simferopol and Sevastopol.

The website of the organisation writes: “Eurocontrol is strictly following ICAO Convention on International Civil Aviation and will not recognise any unilateral declaration of air navigation service provision over any part of Ukrainian airspace other than from the Ukrainian authority.”

Eurocontrol also recommends coordinating with Ukrainian, Romanian, Bulgarian and Turkish ACCs in order to mitigate possible impact of disrupted traffic flows.

The European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation was founded in 1960 to coordinate and plan air traffic control in Europe. Eurocontrol has 25 members: Germany, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the UK, Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Malta, Cyprus, Hungary, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, Denmark, Slovenia, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Italy, Romania, Slovakia, Spain and Croatia.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) is a UN specialized agency that codifies the principles and techniques of international air navigation and ensures safe and orderly growth of international civil aviation in the world. ICAO forbids passenger planes to perform flights to airports of unrecognised republics and territories.