Air Canada has apologized after its inflight maps were found showing the Palestinian Territories but not Israel, blaming an outside supplier and disabling the feature until a fix is made. The times are such that this sort of thing can be inflammatory as hell. Thing is, it’s not remotely the first time it’s happened. Per CNN’s reporting, it happened with JetBlue’s maps last year and with British Airways back in 2013.

So what’s going on? None of the articles give any sort of explanation, though the Snopes page suggests that GeoFusion is the ultimate source of the inflight maps. My guess is that there are airlines that cannot or will not show Israel on a map: several Gulf state carriers come to mind, and GeoFusion lists several on its website (though to be fair I have no knowledge of whether this actually applies to them). Is it possible that GeoFusion has a bespoke no-Israel version for these carriers, and every so often other airlines get that version by mistake?

Frankly if GeoFusion doesn’t have different versions of its maps I’d be shocked, seeing as they list Air India and several Chinese carriers as their clients, and the map required by one country is illegal in the other. To say nothing of how a China-compliant map with the Nine-dash Line would land with Vietnam Airlines, or Crimea-as-Ukraine with Aeroflot.

Inflight maps aren’t an immediately obvious front line in the various map wars (disputed borders, place names, etc.) but now that I think about it . . .