CNN
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Look at a map of the world showing all the airplanes currently in the air and what stands out most — apart from the staggering number of aircraft up there — are the gigantic holes in the sky where no flights can be found.
These no-fly zones usually occur where there’s a risk to aircraft safety from events on the ground. The escalating conflict in the Middle East is the latest global situation to punch holes through air traffic flows, a situation that aviation experts say is costing commercial airlines time and money as they reroute or cancel flights.
It’s a reminder that, even when cocooned in a metal tube at 40,000 feet, watching a Hollywood movie and being served dinner and drinks, air passengers remain inescapably tied to the events happening far below them. Global travel is subject to the whims of international geopolitics at most times, but never more so than in the sky.
However, after contending with a string of conflicts going back to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and beyond, the disruption of war has become a fact of life that airlines have become adept at dealing with.
And natural disasters, like the current volcanic eruption near Bali, Indonesia, can be much more troublesome for the air carriers, one analyst says.
“Airspace closures have become quite common,” said Brendan Sobie, a Singapore-based aviation consultant.
“It’s almost like the new normal for airlines to have to navigate this kind of thing,” he told CNN, mentioning the recent flare-up of tensions between India and Pakistan, last year’s strikes by Israel and Iran and the war in Ukraine as just some of the manmade events that have disrupted air travel in recent years.
As live air tracking maps from websites like FlightRadar24 show, there are now gaping holes over Israel, Iraq, Iran and Ukraine with most traffic squeezed into corridors that skirt around those countries.
There is still some international air traffic over Russia, but this mainly consists of Chinese carriers like Air China, Xiamen Air or Cathay Pacific. Russian airspace bordering Ukraine has been closed to all commercial airlines since the start of the invasion, so China’s European routes primarily enter or depart above the Baltic Sea, near St. Petersburg.
“Airlines have departments of people constantly looking at airspace issues and assessing risk,” Sobie said, adding that each airline has different variables on how they operate.
“Even airspace that’s open, some airlines might deem it as not safe” and reroute accordingly, he said.
Often that rerouting involves significant diversions. Pilots must be able to fly far enough away from danger zones that unexpected weather conditions do not accidentally push them over the line, or on-board crises force them to make emergency landings in the wrong place.
Increasingly, in an age of cyber warfare, there’s also the potential danger of GPS jamming or spoofing around combat zones — with satellite navigation systems at risk of being tricked into showing false locations.
No matter the airline, flight disruptions cost money — a lot of it, said Tony Stanton, consultant director of Strategic Air in Australia.
For example, he said the current conflict in Iran and Israel is forcing carriers to add two hours on to nonstop flights from London to Hong Kong.
Even for relatively efficient long-haul jetliners like Boeing’s 777 or Airbus’ A350, that means using up considerably more fuel.
“To put that into perspective, whilst many factors affect fuel burn, a B777 burns around $7,000 per hour of fuel as a rough estimate,” Stanton said.
Besides fuel, airlines may see increased costs for crew time, new charges to overfly different airspace as well as lost revenue from delays and cancellations.
And those losses cannot be quickly recouped because most passengers have booked their tickets weeks or months in advance of the event that’s causing the problems.
Adding those costs into future ticket sales may not be possible because supply and demand on routes may have changed since the conflict began, the analysts said.
“The business of running a profitable airline is not easy,” Stanton noted.
While the current Mideast conflict has seen commercial flights to Iran and Israel stopped entirely, airlines that would once fly over those destinations are having to change routes.
Sobie said that the biggest effect proportionately has been on short-haul flights between Central Asia and Mideast destinations like Dubai or Doha. Those flights might have spent two hours of a three- or four-hour flight in Iranian airspace before the fighting began, he said.
Many flights that would have crossed Iranian, Iraqi, Jordanian or Israeli airspace are rerouting to flight corridors over Saudi Arabia, Egypt and up into Turkey, Stanton said.
“FlightRadar24 clearly shows how air traffic is currently being pressed into two narrow corridors, particularly a corridor to the south of the conflict zones.”
That can mean more work for air traffic controllers, who are fitting more aircraft into smaller spaces, said experts.
Accommodations can be made by adjusting things like flight altitudes and take-off times, they said — however, these factors too can have an impact on price, with prime airport “slots” for take-off and landing costing airlines yet more cash.
The analysts also noted that more people and planes are flying today than ever before, and that makes handling any disruptions for conflict more difficult.
For instance, air traffic in Central Asia is three times what it was just a few years ago, Sobie said.
The potentially tragic stakes of crossing certain airspace regions were starkly highlighted in July 2014 when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down by a surface-to-air missile launched from an area of Ukraine held by pro-Russian rebels. The incident claimed the lives of all 298 people on board.
Adding to the air carriers’ concerns is the lack of certainty on when conflicts end. For instance, the war in Ukraine started in February 2022, and route changes and cancellations that resulted from that are still in effect.
Watch: Indonesia volcano spews ash into the sky
Flight restrictions imposed after flare-ups between Iran and Israel last year were short-lived, Sobie said.
Even with the uncertainty of war, Stanton noted there are bigger worries for air carriers, like volcanoes.
“The most common other phenomenon impacting air routes is volcanic eruptions like what we see in Bali today,” Stanton said.
Clouds of volcanic ash contain silica, which can fuse to jet engine parts with catastrophic consequences, can be blown over long distances in high-altitude winds, he said, noting that the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption in Iceland affected more than 10 million passengers and cost airlines over $1.7 billion.
As thick clouds billowed out of Eyjafjallajökull, the skies over the North Atlantic — one of the world’s busiest aviation routes — fell silent, with air traffic dropping to levels that wouldn’t be seen again until the Covid pandemic a decade later.
“A volcano’s eruption can have much greater impacts than a conflict zone,” Stanton said.
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the region where air traffic increased by three times in recent years.
