An El Al plane crossed the Sudanese airspace on a flight from Argentina to Tel Aviv, and the plane transmitted the flight path through flight applications as usual as it passed over the Sudanese airspace.
The aircraft, marked ELY046, was seen at the flight tracking website "Flight RADAR" as it entered Sudanese airspace at around 9:30 pm "Israel time", about 12 hours after take-off from Buenos Aires, and it was supposed to land in Tel Aviv around midnight.
Reduction
: Granting Sudan permission to allow Israeli aircraft to cross its airspace, if it becomes permanent, will reduce direct flights between Ben Gurion Airport and Buenos Aires by approximately two hours. The journey has now taken about 16 hours.
And the Israeli "Yediot Aharonot" website stated that on the plane there were rabbis specialized in slaughtering according to the Jewish rites within an Israeli delegation of meat importers.
The website said that this trip bears new signs of warming relations between Israel and Sudan, as it is the first commercial plane belonging to the national carrier of Israel - El Al - which crosses, for the first time, Sudanese airspace.
He explained that a similar trip to Buenos Aires on Wednesday, with kosher food inspectors on board, took the longest usual route, as it flew westward over the Mediterranean and did not turn south until after passing through Spain.
The site added that the green light was granted to the trip to return to Sudan suddenly on Thursday, and the Sudanese authorities sought to reduce the interest that would be gained from this development, so I insisted on postponing the flight so that it does not enter its airspace until after the end of the evening news of the country on Sudanese TV. El Al and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to comment on the news.
Although Thursday's plane is the first commercial flight to cross Sudanese airspace, it is not the first from Israel to Sudan. In February, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that an Israeli plane flew over Sudanese airspace for the first time after meeting with the President of the Sudanese Sovereign Council, Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, in Uganda.
An Israeli official said at the time that the plane that Netanyahu spoke of was "an Israeli private plane" and not affiliated with the national carrier.
And the Israeli "Channel 13" reported last week that an Israeli plane carried a medical team to Khartoum to treat Najwa Al-Qud Al-Dam, known to promote normalization with Israel before her death.
It is noteworthy that Saudi Arabia had allowed Indian Airlines two years ago to use its airspace on direct flights between Tel Aviv and New Delhi.