Flight Times Increase As Airlines Reroute Around War Zones

17.11.2023 - 07:17 / forbes.com

One knock-on effect of the conflicts taking place in Europe and the Middle East is that airlines and passengers are seeing an increase in costs and flight times, as planes have to be rerouted across large parts of the world.

Some airlines have stopped flying to Tel Aviv and it is now harder to fly in and out of the region, for obvious reasons, as reported by Bloomberg. Lufthansa, for example, is no longer flying to nearby cities and Ryanair has relocated its planes to other routes where there is more demand.

Israel's El Al airline has had to completely change its schedule, rerouting flights away from the Arabian peninsula, adding hours to Bangkok flights, for example.

ForwardKeys, a travel analytics firm told Bloomberg that international flight demand has decreased by 5% since the attacks in Israel on 7 October and some airlines have even ordered new stock that can travel further to cope with the expected shift—it was one of the reasons that Air France-KLM recently ordered new A350 jetliners.

An extra hour of flying can cost more than $7,000 and whilst airlines can reroute over Egyptian airspace or across Azerbaijan the impact on the bottom line, as well as customer flight times, means it might not be the most appealing choice.

Likewise, a lot of Europe's airspace is out of action because of the Ukraine war. Over summer, one fifth of Europe's airspace was out of bounds, a situation made worse by infrastructure that was buckling under extreme climatic events and a volume of air traffic that hasn't been seen since before the pandemic.

Steven Moore, Head of Air Traffic Management Operations at Eurocontrol, a European government organisation that oversees flights across the EU skies for both holidaymakers and the military, said at the time, that while the situation was stable, the Ukrainian war had brought radical changes to pre-existing traffic patterns.

Whilst non-European carriers were still operating across Russia (and getting a competitive advantage over EU airlines that are following the current sanctions) many other airlines have changed travel flows.

The stark result of the reciprocated flight bans on both sides of the Ukraine war was that some of the fastest routes across the skies—which ordinarily fly through Russian, Canadian and European airspace—were forced to slow down and reroute. The British Airways flight that runs from London to Shanghai, for instance, is currently operating on a schedule that is two hours longer than the same route operated by China Eastern that flies over Russian airspace.

It comes at a time when airlines are particularly stretched by the lack of corporate travel taking place, which hasn't recovered to pre-pandemic levels. This is where airlines make about 80% of their