How conflicts reshape air travel

By Anupreeta Das

When Israel launched surprise missile attacks on Iran, prompting retaliatory strikes, 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 per cent of the world’s land mass is affected by conflict, a rise of 65 per cent 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 an American 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.

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 $10,000 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.

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 per cent 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 under 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 on United Airlines that flew over Russia took as little as 13 hours; since the war of Ukraine, US airlines have been flying via Europe, which has added an hour or two.