Air embargoes due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are creating huge no-go areas in the sky, with big implications for airlines that normally cross the skies of Eastern Europe en route to Asia. This Sunday (27), the European Union announced the closure of airspace to Russian flights, announced Ursula von der Leyan, president of the European Commission.
All of this could have significant consequences for passengers, airlines and the cost of flights if Europe and Russia relive the Cold War era, when air routes were diverted around the “iron curtain”, the border of the Soviet Union. with European countries.
So far, the UK and Russia have banned each other’s planes from flying over or landing in their territories. Other bans began to follow, with Poland and the Czech Republic restricting Russian aircraft access on Friday. As of Sunday, at least 18 countries had announced the closure of airspace for flights from Russia.
Despite creating a significant hole in the air traffic map of Eastern Europe, disruption to long-distance traffic is minimal so far. Even Russian aircraft using international airspace over the Atlantic were not affected, despite the area being managed by UK-based air traffic services.
The effects on commercial airlines already affected by Covid-19 and their passengers will be relatively limited at this point if the bans remain between Russia on the one hand and the UK, Poland and the Czech Republic on the other. Likewise, the situation could easily escalate.
Shadow of Covid-19
“Because of Russia’s geographic scale, flights from airlines from all over the world pass through the country’s airspace every day,” said Mikael Robertsson, co-founder of the Flightradar24 aircraft tracking service. “From the UK, typically around a dozen flights a day pass through Russia en route to places like Hong Kong and India.”
“From the European Union, hundreds of flights pass through Russia on their way to destinations in Asia. And from the US, most cargo traffic to Asia passes through at least a small portion of Russian airspace. Before Covid, the numbers were even higher, especially from the UK, but long-haul passenger flights have yet to catch up,” he added.
In terms of flight services, the only Russian passenger airline serving the UK is Aeroflot. The UK’s largest carrier, British Airways (BA), served Moscow before the war. BA’s parent company, International Airlines Group, has announced that its airlines will not fly over Russian airspace.
At the start of the conflict, the US Federal Aviation Administration issued NOTAM (Notification for Air Missions) instructions to US carriers to avoid operations in areas that include all of Ukraine, Belarus and western parts of Russia. Few US airlines fly over Russia, with nonstop flights to India still taking a long time to fully resume after Covid’s aviation shutdowns.
Meanwhile, the Asian networks of British Airways and Virgin Atlantic have largely not been restored after being suspended because of the pandemic.
The relatively closed borders of Japan, China and other countries for international landings, for public health reasons, mean that passenger services by UK airlines remain limited.
But for cargo airlines the story is different.
Already burdened by excess online shopping since the start of the pandemic, as well as equipment sales, for example, boosted by the pandemic response, freight carriers such as FedEx, UPS, Atlas, Kalitta, Western Global and others could be hit hardest with the bans.
These airlines regularly fly over Russia, but the way their routes are structured is different from passenger airlines. There are shorter flights to save fuel and allow for the use of older or shorter-range aircraft such as the Boeing 767, McDonnell-Douglas MD-11 and Boeing 747-400.
Distance vs. Time
The main problems probably stem from overflight rights. Most passenger flights between Europe and East or Southeast Asia fly over Russia as a simple function of geography.
London to Tokyo, for example, is a flight of around 11 to 12 hours, usually over Russian airspace and the Nordic countries.
The first option for airlines to avoid Russia is to fly south, bypassing the Black Sea and Caucasus before flying over Central Asia. This would be a slightly modified post-Soviet version of the London-India-Hong Kong routes flown during the Cold War.
Depending on how far south of the Black Sea the aircraft would need to fly, this would add about two to three hours to the nonstop journey from London to Tokyo, but would be just under an hour shorter than the second option over Alaska.
The second option is to fly north over Greenland and the far north of Canada to Alaska and the Bering Strait, avoiding eastern Russia. This was the standard situation for flights between the UK and Japan for much of the Cold War, when many airlines added a refueling stop in Anchorage, Alaska, for flights between Europe and East Asia.
In modern terms, this Alaskan route would add about 2,700 to 3,700 kilometers to the shorter Great Circle route between London and Tokyo, about three to four hours.
But modern aircraft may not even need to stop in Anchorage. A relatively generous route from London to Tokyo over northern Alaska, the Aleutian Islands and around the Kuril Islands runs between 12,000 and 13,000 kilometers.
This is well within the range of modern aircraft, with around 20 air routes before and after Covid-19 longer than that, including Dubai to Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Auckland or Hong Kong to Boston and New York.
These flights are, or were, regularly performed by aircraft such as the Airbus A380 or the Boeing 777-300ER, which date back about 20 years in terms of technology. Aircraft more than a decade younger, such as the Boeing 787 and the Airbus A350 or A330neo, all now in wide operation, would be even more capable of flying these routes.
Notably, this stopover route is unlikely to encounter issues around ETOPS, the set of rules where twin-engine aircraft must stay within a certain time of potential diversion airports. Modern jets are certified for this time limit to be over six hours, and airports in Greenland, northern Canada, Alaska and Japan are more than within reach.
Escalations could include other European countries joining the UK in banning Russian airlines and overflights. If this action were at the NATO level, it would include Norway (which is a NATO member), but not Sweden and Finland. If it were at the EU level, the reverse could be true: Sweden and Finland are EU members, but Norway is not, although it has joined the EU in some of the existing sanctions on Russia.
In the event of any action, Russia would likely retaliate, which would mean further detours to the north or south. Russia could also ban overflights destined for any sanctioned country, although that seems less likely.
A spoiler for the whole issue, however, is how China will react as it sees economically important routes between it and major international markets become more expensive and complicated. While Chinese airlines can fly over Russia unless Russia prohibits overflights based on the destination country, the cargo issue is particularly tricky in this case.
financial impacts
The ban will have a financial impact on airlines, but also on Russia, which charges international airlines hundreds of millions of dollars every year for overflight rights.
“There are dozens of flights from the EU to Asia that transit Russian airspace daily,” explains Addison Schonland, partner at consultancy AirInsight Group. “All these are double-aisle passenger planes or large freighters. This means that they generate decent daily income for Russia, even though the routes are cost-effective between origin and destinations.”
In the case of detours, says Schonland, “operators will incur more costs by flying less economically efficient routes and, consequently, may also pay more overflight fees. Passengers and freight can expect surcharges soon.”
As Schonland points out, the 2014 MH17 disaster, in which a Malaysia Air passenger plane was shot down during fighting in eastern Ukraine, “nobody wants to be anywhere near the conflict zone”.
“I expect most flights will start flying south and take the long way around, but it wouldn’t be a surprise to see operators considering the ‘way back’ over Alaska,” notes Schonland. “We have access to much better weather reports now, and it may be that when there is a good tailwind, flying east works better: for example, taking the southern EU route to Asia and then heading east over the Alaska from Asia to the EU”.
Notably, as Airline Weekly analyst Madhu Unnikrishnan points out, these transactions are handled through the International Air Transport Association, an industry body representing the world airline IATA outside the scope of the Swift interbank payments network, which could be used against Russia in future sanctions.
It remains to be seen whether Europe could also specifically ban overflight payments alongside Swift.
Whatever the next developments in this war’s impacts on commercial aviation – and it’s a safe bet there will be more overflight bans at the very least – they could end up changing the way we fly.
Source: CNN Brasil
I’m James Harper, a highly experienced and accomplished news writer for World Stock Market. I have been writing in the Politics section of the website for over five years, providing readers with up-to-date and insightful information about current events in politics. My work is widely read and respected by many industry professionals as well as laymen.
