The Canadian connection

The alleged attempt by Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab to bring down Northwest/Delta flight 253 on Christmas Day, using explosive underpants, continues to draw international headlines, including here in Canada.

What has hitherto gone strangely unreported, however, is the fact that, had the alleged bomb plot been successful, it would have happened not in the United States, but in Canadian airspace and on Canadian soil. As do so many trans-Atlantic flights, and so many flights on approach to the border city of Detroit, flight 253 passed over Canada.

Flightwise.com has helpfully provided a ground track of the Schipol to Detroit flight that was the target of the alleged plot, from which the following Google Earth screen caps are taken. This shows the last few minutes of the flight — during which time the accused was being subdued aboard the aircraft — as it passed over southwestern Ontario and across Lake St. Clair into Michigan:

Looking out further, and back in time, the plane and its 289 passengers and crew members crossed Labrador, north-central Quebec, and parts of Ontario, just like dozens of other commercial jetliners do every day:

Flight 253 made its landfall on the north Labrador coast. Despite the sparsely settled geography of Labrador, where communities are compact and separated by miles of wilderness, the plane passed directly over two permanently populated places; Hopedale and Labrador City: