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Routes Closed for business
As the war in Ukraine continues to rage, airlines around the world have been forced to adapt their strategies around the closure of Russian and Ukrainian airspace, which rendered many Asian routes fi nancially unviable. Andrea Valentino speaks to John Grant of OAG Aviation and John Gradek of McGill University to learn why Nordic carriers have been especially hard-hit by the disruption, how focusing on new routes can help mitigate these diffi culties – and why ever-present challenges around slots and geopolitics mean operators won’t be able to rest easy anytime soon.
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f you have a spare few minutes, I recommend clicking on Flightradar24. Visit the website and you’ll soon see what I mean. Boasting an interactive map of every aircraft currently in the sky – encompassing literally thousands of flights, and ranging from commercial jets to military sorties – it gives a bewildering insight into the complexities of global aviation. Even as I write, I can follow any number of journeys, updated by Flightradar24 and tracked by a gaggle of international volunteers. Flight AEW1035, for instance, is an Aegean Airlines Learjet, currently making its way from Athens to Faro. ETH507, just entering Angolan airspace, is an Ethiopian Airlines flight from São Paulo to Addis Ababa. RRR2717, for its part, is a Royal Air Force cargo plane currently flying north into the Atlantic from a base on the Falklands – destination unknown.
All told, there are between 8,000 and 13,000 flights in the air at any one time – and if you zoom out far enough on Flightradar24 map, whole swathes of Europe and North America are completely obscured by thousands of aircraft, each zipping to and fro. But if you scroll east from Warsaw, or west from Los Angeles, you’ll notice far fewer flights, with Russian airspace only hosting a smattering of commercial jets. Ukraine, for its part, currently hosts precisely none. The reasons for this absence are, of course, obvious. President Zelensky closed his country’s airspace to civil traffic back in February 2022, right at the start of the Russian invasion. Thereafter, Western governments engaged in tit-for-tat airspace closures with their new adversary. By early March, Moscow had banned 36 countries from flying their aircraft over Russian territory, a list that ranged from Lithuania to Malta to Sweden.
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