Qatar Airways was forced to divert more than 90 flights after Iran’s strike on an American military base in Qatar. Photo / Getty Images
Whether caused by a long war or brief skirmish, the closing of skies to air travel is having big effects on cost, convenience and safety.
When Israel launched surprise missile attacks on Iran, prompting retaliatory strikes, Persian Gulf countries closed their skies, forcing more than two dozen of the world’s major airlines to divert or cancel flights.
When India and Pakistan engaged in a brief but intense conflict in May, Pakistan and India each banned the use of their skies by the other’s airlines.
After Russia began its war on Ukraine in 2022 and closed its airspace to Western airlines, many American and European airlines were forced to redraw flight paths – a disruption that remains today.
In recent years, airlines worldwide have increasingly had to deal with geopolitics, as extended wars and sudden conflicts require them to abruptly remap major routes and recalculate profitability.
The risk was clear in 2014, when a Malaysia Airlines jet was shot down over a part of Ukraine controlled by pro-Russia separatists, killing all 298 people on board. In December, dozens died when an Azerbaijan Airlines plane crashed while over Russian airspace, likely after being hit by its air defence systems.
More than 4.5% of the world’s land mass is affected by conflict, a rise of 65% since 2021, according to a report last year by Verisk Maplecroft, a risk consultancy.
Conflict is among the biggest causes of disruption for the civil aviation sector, which operates more than 100,000 commercial flights carrying 10 million people a day. Airlines must already balance passenger demand, weather, fuel costs, government regulations, and pilot and crew schedules for each flight.
The recent exchange of attacks between Iran and Israel was particularly disruptive for global carriers because Middle Eastern cities are often pit stops between Asian and European destinations. Qatar Airways was forced to divert more than 90 flights after Iran’s strike on a US military base in Qatar last Monday, disrupting travel for more than 20,000 passengers.
Despite the ceasefire between Iran and Israel, airlines are prepared for the possibility that attacks might resume. Many have suspended routes through the Middle East.
One Qantas plane left Perth, Australia, for Paris on Tuesday, only to turn back midway and return to Perth after 15 hours in the air. Already reeling from the recent deadly crash of one of its Boeing Dreamliner planes, Air India last week asked for “the understanding of all passengers” affected by fresh disruptions the conflict had caused. On Wednesday, the airline said it had resumed some routes, as had other carriers.
Airlines can bounce back quickly from such short-term disruptions – Qatar Airways said that there were no remaining passengers stranded days after the strike on the US military base.
But prolonged conflicts, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, can have wide-ranging consequences.
Since 2022, many airlines have had to reroute flights to avoid Russia, the world’s biggest country by area, with an airspace crucial to long-distance flights connecting Europe and North America to large parts of Asia.
An extra hour of flying the kind of large plane used on long, international routes can add about US$10,000 ($16,000) in costs, mainly in fuel, labour and maintenance expenses, said Andreas Schäfer, a professor at the UCL Energy Institute at University College London. In a competitive market with limited demand, that can quickly bring an airline “very close to the limits of profitability,” he said.
Some carriers added stops to previously nonstop flights or abandoned newly unprofitable routes. Others flew with fewer passengers or less cargo because demand had fallen or the airlines couldn’t justify the expense of flying the longer distances with a full load. In extreme cases, business models had to be redrawn.
“The longer the period of the aerospace disruption and the closure, the more the impact on airlines,” said Ahmed Abdelghany, a professor at Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida.
Finnair, which is based in Finland, a neighbour to Russia, had spent decades making itself a hub for flights between Europe and Asia. That strategy unravelled after the war began.
Its flights to Asia are now as much as 40% longer than before, severely hindering Finnair’s ability to compete with Chinese airlines, which remain free to use Russian airspace. A direct flight from Helsinki to Shanghai, for example, is now just less than nine hours on China’s Juneyao Airlines, but takes more than 12 hours on Finnair. As a result, Finnair has had to focus on flights elsewhere.
Unable to fly over Russia, American carriers suffered too. A popular nonstop route between New Delhi and Newark, New Jersey, on United Airlines that flew over Russia took as little as 13 hours; since the invasion of Ukraine, US airlines have been flying via Europe, which has added an hour or two.
Until recently, Air India could fly the same nonstop route in less time because Russia kept its airspace free for Indian carriers. It lost that competitive advantage in late April after a deadly terror attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir that India accused Pakistan of sponsoring led to an exchange of airstrikes.
Pakistani airspace has remained closed to Indian airlines, requiring Air India to adjust its flight paths to and from North America, making some routes longer.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Anupreeta Das and Niraj Chokshi
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