The British Airways position on various border disputes

I believe that Drew's primary point is that BA is republishing this and therefore, more or less standing behind it as their position as well. And it's worth noting that the blog post opens by describing their valiant effort to search for copyright notices or some other indicator of who wrote/provided/published the information therein.

And I don't know about OSM's techniques, but the foremost digital map providers often use heuristics to determine what to display in certain situations. It is said that Google Maps displays "Gulf of America" nomenclature to users in the U.S.A. or users with a United States/English locale, while displaying "Gulf of Mexico" to users located elsewhere.

Likewise, Wikipedia has run up against disputes where foreign governments are trying to get them to take down maps and diagrams that indicate "the wrong borders" and they're grappling with how to "accurately reflect" a disputed territory that really depends on perspective or nationality or location to properly depict it.

As Drew indicates, their flight track was from London to Tokyo, and therefore would not have located the aircraft in such regions as Israel/Palestine. Would the OSM results have been different if it was located thus? It seems that most of the data in question is static.