It's worth noting that Finnair hasn't lost an aircraft since 1963, and are by some measures thus the safest airline out there.
They're no minnow either: while not huge in the US, they've made a killing by exploiting their geographical location as the fastest transfer hub between northern Asia and Europe.
I love how "rakastevagen" => "rakaste vägen" is Swedish for "the shortest path", but also sounds a bit Finnish to me, a non-Finnish speaker. Reminiscent of "rakastan", which a Swede would know from "minä rakastan sinua", or "I love you".
Rakaste vägen is the aggregation of the Finnish word Rakaste and the Swedish word vägen. There are quite a few words in Finnish that are borrowed from Swedish.
Because it's slightly surprising... Despite being neighbors, Swedish and Finnish are only distantly related. Finnish is closer to Hungarian, and Swedish is similar to the other Scandinavian languages and Germanic languages.
Surely Ryanair takes that crown, an airline which has never had a fatal accident, and which is an order of magnitude larger than Finnair (~130,000,000 passengers annually vs ~13,000,000).
Although Qantas has not had a fatal accident for ~70 years, it has a much smaller fleet and has had far more non-fatal incidents and accidents than Ryanair.
The real contender is Hawaiian Airlines, a ~90-year-old airline with no fatal accidents. Still, it's an order of magnitude smaller than Ryanair (~12,000,000 annual passengers).
This is good story to recall whenever someone says that governments, organizations, and other big groups of people can't keep secrets. This was kept secret for 27 years (1987 to 2014)! I imagine that the pilots told their wives, friends, and other pilots all about it. Nobody was even asking them to keep it secret. Probably hundreds of people knew what happened, but the public and the Finnish Transport Safety Agency didn't find out for decades. Whenever I hear some incident that's made the news, I wonder about hundreds or thousands of worse incidents that same day that didn't make the news for whatever reason.
If the copilot had gone directly to the media this would have been all over the news. At least, I hope it would given the recent spate of outrage driven pieces I've seen about women wearing risque clothing (before anyone objects, they are completely within their rights to do so) being asked to cover up or being removed from a flight.
Another interesting fact - while on the German side, Ribbentrop was executed in 1946, Molotov enjoyed a happy life, although, similarly to Ribbentrop, he was also involved in massacres and crimes against humanity.
Very true. A similar incident, also from Finland, was the downing of the passenger plane Kaleva. It was shot down by Soviet warplanes during peacetime.
The vague publicly stated reason for the crash was that there was an explosion of foreign origin. The Finnish government knew that the plane was shot down by the Soviets, but chose to withhold this information for foreign policy reasons.
The airline's CEO confided the truth to the pilots' widows, who were sworn to secrecy. The true story was kept secret for almost 50 years until a Finnish aviation historian happened to find a copy of a Soviet air force officer's memoirs which describe the incident.
Finn here. Finlandization is absolutely a thing, it's even mentioned OP's Fine Article on Finnair Flight 915 ;)
National-level Finnish politicians still weigh their statements on matters such as the imperialist endeavors of our beloved eastern neighbor. Other institutions are gradually becoming less self-censored.
Someone better informed, or just older than my 30-or-so years can probably be more precise and offer more and better examples.
But I have the sense that internationally renowned journalist Jessikka Aro's reporting on Russian disinfo ops wouldn't have been encouraged, yet translated to English and Russian by Finnish state-owned broadcaster Yle before, say, 2005 https://kioski.yle.fi/omat/jessikka-aros-prize-winning-stori...
Not Finnish. But Finland has fought two wars with the Russians in the last century, and without a protective alliance, really is at Russia's mercy. Look at what happened to Georgia.
I'm a realpolitik guy, so I don't often mince my words.
Or join NATO, which the Baltic states did at the first opportunity. Finland has always refused, although apparently they did think about it in 2007. Ukraine also had the opportunity, didn’t take it, and it didn’t work out so well for them.
It is common knowledge that Ukraine applied to join NATO. I'm interested in your implication that they were ever offered membership. I doubt they ever were because I think the United States (and probably other members) considered an offer too likely to risk a war with Russia.
--in other words their being invited into a MAP does not mean they would have been invited to become a member.
When the USSR collapsed, George Bush the elder was President, and he was one of the US's best Presidents on foreign policy, and no way he would've gone along with offering NATO membership to Ukraine. If the Obama adminstration was willing to do it, I find that depressing because NATO does not have the conventional military strength to defend Ukraine from a Russian invasion, and of course would be unwilling to launch a nuclear attack on Russia over the fate of Ukraine. It would be a mistake for NATO to make any public commitment it is not willing and able to keep. Credibility is essential for avoiding war.
Ukraine should have kept its nuclear weapons. The USSR collapsed in 89/90, and Ukraine gave up its nukes in 1994. NATO didn't have the capability of defending Ukraine (had it joined) until 2004 when Poland and Slovakia joined. Without a border adjacent to a NATO member, it's hard to defend.
Yes and no. Your explanation looks like an excuse for conspiracy theorists.
It was kept secret because it looks like nothing much happened, nobody nor the plane was harmed. I've seen weird things I can't explain, and I "kept them secret" because most probably, nothing very interesting (like E.T. landing) or serious (like people getting killed) happened.
Regarding the news, as complete information is impossible, the system is some sort of Chinese whispers game with multiple levels of filtering through multiple conflicting choices providing only a very remote glimpse of the real thing. There's nothing much we can do about it (except getting to the source and being very thorough on matters that you really care about, and live with the fact that you mostly know nothing).
Consider climate change: Comes a new IPCC report. It's a digest of millions of papers from various sources and sciences (no one is really called a "climatologist": climate science is made by oceanologists, glaciologists, wheather specialists, etc). IPCC writes a 4000 pages report (100x or 1000x reduction from the source material). From this report, a 40 pages digest is made. Newspapers write (and people read) half-page articles about the new IPCC report, by reading this 40 pages digest and little else. As almost nobody reads more than partial reports of this 40-pages digest, unsurprisingly misunderstanding and ignorance prevail.
46 comments
[ 202 ms ] story [ 1963 ms ] threadThey're no minnow either: while not huge in the US, they've made a killing by exploiting their geographical location as the fastest transfer hub between northern Asia and Europe.
https://www.finnair.com/hu/gb/home/rakastevagen
The real contender is Hawaiian Airlines, a ~90-year-old airline with no fatal accidents. Still, it's an order of magnitude smaller than Ryanair (~12,000,000 annual passengers).
Not sure what this means. How is Helsinki better suited for this than Moscow to serve Asia<>Europe? Aeroflot is one of the most underrated airlines.
Another interesting fact - while on the German side, Ribbentrop was executed in 1946, Molotov enjoyed a happy life, although, similarly to Ribbentrop, he was also involved in massacres and crimes against humanity.
The vague publicly stated reason for the crash was that there was an explosion of foreign origin. The Finnish government knew that the plane was shot down by the Soviets, but chose to withhold this information for foreign policy reasons.
The airline's CEO confided the truth to the pilots' widows, who were sworn to secrecy. The true story was kept secret for almost 50 years until a Finnish aviation historian happened to find a copy of a Soviet air force officer's memoirs which describe the incident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleva_(airplane)
https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2018/04/24/matkustajakone-kale... (in Finnish)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandization
National-level Finnish politicians still weigh their statements on matters such as the imperialist endeavors of our beloved eastern neighbor. Other institutions are gradually becoming less self-censored.
Someone better informed, or just older than my 30-or-so years can probably be more precise and offer more and better examples.
But I have the sense that internationally renowned journalist Jessikka Aro's reporting on Russian disinfo ops wouldn't have been encouraged, yet translated to English and Russian by Finnish state-owned broadcaster Yle before, say, 2005 https://kioski.yle.fi/omat/jessikka-aros-prize-winning-stori...
It’s certainly not a nation of very thin-skinned people.
I'm a realpolitik guy, so I don't often mince my words.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine–NATO_relations
Really Ukraine should have made NATO membership a condition of giving up its nukes when the USSR collapsed.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/topics_37356.htm
--in other words their being invited into a MAP does not mean they would have been invited to become a member.
When the USSR collapsed, George Bush the elder was President, and he was one of the US's best Presidents on foreign policy, and no way he would've gone along with offering NATO membership to Ukraine. If the Obama adminstration was willing to do it, I find that depressing because NATO does not have the conventional military strength to defend Ukraine from a Russian invasion, and of course would be unwilling to launch a nuclear attack on Russia over the fate of Ukraine. It would be a mistake for NATO to make any public commitment it is not willing and able to keep. Credibility is essential for avoiding war.
It was kept secret because it looks like nothing much happened, nobody nor the plane was harmed. I've seen weird things I can't explain, and I "kept them secret" because most probably, nothing very interesting (like E.T. landing) or serious (like people getting killed) happened.
Regarding the news, as complete information is impossible, the system is some sort of Chinese whispers game with multiple levels of filtering through multiple conflicting choices providing only a very remote glimpse of the real thing. There's nothing much we can do about it (except getting to the source and being very thorough on matters that you really care about, and live with the fact that you mostly know nothing).
Consider climate change: Comes a new IPCC report. It's a digest of millions of papers from various sources and sciences (no one is really called a "climatologist": climate science is made by oceanologists, glaciologists, wheather specialists, etc). IPCC writes a 4000 pages report (100x or 1000x reduction from the source material). From this report, a 40 pages digest is made. Newspapers write (and people read) half-page articles about the new IPCC report, by reading this 40 pages digest and little else. As almost nobody reads more than partial reports of this 40-pages digest, unsurprisingly misunderstanding and ignorance prevail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Hansa_(1899)
See what I did there?