The hole in the sky: How Middle East airspace closures are reshaping global aviation

By Francesca Street, CNN

(CNN) — Open the airplane-tracking website Flightradar24 right now and the change is unmistakable. Where one of the world’s busiest aviation crossroads should be — a dense web of aircraft linking Europe, Asia and Africa — there is instead a yawning gap. A hole in the sky.

As conflict escalates in Iran with knock-on effects across the Middle East, vast swaths of regional airspace have closed or emptied. And because this region sits at the center of modern long-haul travel, the disruption is rippling far beyond it.

For decades, Europe-to-Asia traffic has flowed straight through the Middle East. The region is home to some of aviation’s most powerful megahubs — Dubai International Airport, Hamad International Airport and Zayed International Airport — and to carriers such as Emirates, Qatar Airways and Etihad Airways, whose business models are built on connecting East and West.

When that airspace closes, the consequences are immediate and global. Flights must reroute, often adding time, burning more fuel and creating knock-on complications for crews and aircraft — and higher costs.

Aircraft are displaced and crews stranded. As uncertainty mounts, there are implications for aircraft insurance, ticket prices and operational sustainability.

A collapsed bridge

Tony Stanton, consultant director of Strategic Air in Australia, describes Middle Eastern airspace as “a high-capacity bridge” between Europe and Asia.

“When that bridge collapses, or the bridge closes, the traffic doesn’t largely disappear,” Stanton tells CNN Travel. “It tends to funnel either north or south into those two main corridors, and then what we see is those two corridors become very congested because they’re narrow corridors.”

The result: longer delays, more disruptions, greater uncertainty.

There’s no room for improvisation. “Airlines can’t just fly anywhere they like,” Stanton says.

“They need permission to overfly each country’s air space, and they can only route through airspace that’s open and managed by air traffic control,” he says. “They need to, obviously, get those permissions to overfly countries that they weren’t overflying before.”

Airlines do prepare for geopolitical volatility. Sophisticated risk-monitoring systems scan global flashpoints, allowing operations teams to model contingencies before closures actually happen.

New flight plans are calculated, fuel loads adjusted and crews repositioned — all through what Stanton says is a “well-oiled process.”

But even this system can strain under prolonged disruption.

The current “hole in the sky” evokes earlier aviation shocks, including the months of paralysis during the Covid-19 pandemic, the days of transatlantic shutdown during the 2010 Icelandic volcano eruption, and the still ongoing rerouting caused by the Russia-Ukraine war.

Japan Airlines Flight JL43 from Tokyo to London is a case in point. Before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it flew west over Russian territory. For the past three years, it has operated eastward over the Pacific, Alaska and Canada — adding up to 2.4 hours and burning about 5,600 extra gallons of fuel per flight, an increase of roughly 20%.

Those kinds of detours come at a cost.

Long-haul aircraft already carry contingency fuel in case of last-minute route changes, but extended operating time can require additional crew members — or even fuel stops if the new routing exceeds the aircraft’s range.

“That also adds costs,” Brendan Sobie, a Singapore-based aviation analyst and consultant, tells CNN Travel. “In some extreme cases, you might even need to have a fuel stop because the longer flight is out of the range of the aircraft that’s being used. You add cost because you have to land to take off again. You have additional charges related to a refueling scenario.”

Airlines will be covered, to some extent, by insurance, says Stanton.

“There is actually a thing called war risk insurance,” he explains. That doesn’t mean airlines will be monetarily unaffected. “If the insurers see the risk increasing, well, they’ll seek to increase the premium.”

Meanwhile, oil prices, sensitive to Middle East conflict, add another variable.

“Airline stocks obviously took a little bit of a dive today because of the economic political uncertainty that can impact demand, sometimes, particularly short term,” says Sobie.

In the short term, travelers are unlikely to see a sudden hike on flight prices.

But, says Stanton, if the Iran crisis becomes “a sustained international event, then airlines will then seek to incorporate their increased operating costs, their reduced effective capacity of the aircraft, back into ticket prices … Airlines will seek to and they’ll have to recover their costs.”

Misplaced crew and aircraft

The operational consequences go beyond fuel. Right now, many crew members and aircraft are stuck in affected regions — one of the reasons why travelers across the globe might experience knock-on flight chaos this week.

“You could be anywhere around the world, and you will likely be affected by what’s going on at the moment,” says Stanton. “An aircraft that currently is sitting in London — in the system the airline might have anticipated that being in Singapore or Brisbane or some other place.”

Carriers do have contingency plans for this kind of scenario, activating reserve crews held on standby.

“Ordinarily, for when people call in sick, they’ll activate the reserve crews,” says Stanton. “They’ll swap aircraft. They also have standby aircraft, and they’ll even cancel flights to try and reset the network — that complicated, interconnected system.”

Airlines house stranded employees in hotels as they wait to see when — or to what degree — airspace reopens and how the situation develops.

Emirates has already announced a limited resumption of some services on Monday evening.

As crew wait for updates, some airline employees have been posting updates on social media. Virgin Australia flight attendant Sarah Goodwin updated followers on TikTok, calling being stuck in the Qatari capital Doha “the craziest situation.”

“I never, ever, in my life thought that I would ever be in a situation where I can hear missiles,” she said.

Airlines’ focus will be keeping crew safe, says Brendan Sobie.

“In this kind of crisis situation, obviously, safety is first and foremost … You try to look after your crew as best as you can,” he says. “And then, once things improve, you try to restart things and move the crew back into position, get them back home and start to try to return to normal operations as quickly as possible, but obviously as safely as possible as well.”

Austrian Airlines, part of the Lufthansa group, ran a crew evacuation flight to Muscat, Oman, returning to Vienna, Austia on Monday morning local time, a spokesperson for the airline told CNN.

When will flights return to normal?

The longer the disruption lasts, the longer the recovery times, says Sobie. “If everything completely reopens, that makes it easier than, say, a partial reopening where there’s still a lot of limitations. So, it’s really impossible to predict or forecast, in this case — or in any case, really — how long it will take for a return to normal operation.”

But safety concerns beyond the affected region are unwarranted, Stanton adds. “Major airlines don’t just make these decisions just by looking at Flightradar24 and going, ‘All right. Everybody else is going to the north. Let’s go north.’”

He reiterates that airlines “run really structured intelligence, informed risk assessments.”

“They’ve got specialist security teams, flight ops teams, dispatch teams. They listen to government advice. They probably get some intelligence that we don’t get, and they make very careful decisions about when they’re going to operate,” he says.

“Particularly the major airlines … I personally would be comfortable to jump on a British Airways or a Qantas or Emirates aircraft if that aircraft was operating, because I have comfort in the systems and the risk assessments that the airlines would be running in the background to operate their assets.”

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