India, Pakistan extend airspace closure for each other’s aircraft, airlines by another month

Indian airlines’ flights from North India to West Asia, the Caucasus, Europe, the UK, and North America’s eastern region switching from their routine paths to longer routes, adding anywhere between 15 minutes to a few hours to the journey, depending on the distance and the location of the destination. All major Indian airlines operate international flights to destinations to the west of the country, and many of these flights were routinely overflying Pakistan.

Air India operates flights to West Asia, Europe, the UK, and North America. IndiGo operated flights to West Asia, Turkey, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, but had to suspend flights to the Central Asian cities of Almaty and Tashkent as they are now outside the operational range of its existing fleet of narrow-body aircraft. Air India Express, Akasa Air, and SpiceJet’s west-bound international flights are to destinations in West Asia. According to data from Cirium, an aviation analytics company, currently there are almost 400 weekly westward international departures from North Indian airports—Delhi, Amritsar, Jaipur, and Lucknow—that were routinely flying over Pakistan. Given that all these flights have return legs, the total number of affected flights goes up to around 800 from these airports. Of these, around 640 flights are from or to India’s largest airport—Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International airport—which is likely to be the most affected due to the move by Pakistan.

Additionally, a handful of ultra-long-haul flights from other Indian cities like Mumbai are also getting impacted as their flight paths used to go through the Pakistani airspace. For Pakistan, the impact of India’s airspace closure has been rather insignificant because, unlike India’s booming aviation sector, Pakistan’s struggling flag carrier, Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), has a limited international footprint, and that too largely to the west of the country. According to airline schedule data from Cirium, PIA operates just six flights a week—to and from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, from Lahore and Islamabad—that were routinely flying over India.

Flight tracking data shows that some of Air India’s ultra-long-haul flights to and from North America have had to take technical halts—planned stops for refueling or crew change—at European airports like Copenhagen and Vienna, breaking the journey of the otherwise non-stop flights. The last time when Pakistan closed its airspace for an extended period—in 2019 following the Balakot airstrikes by the Indian Air Force—some of Air India’s flights to North America had to take technical halts midway on a regular basis. When Pakistan closed its airspace for over four months in 2019, Indian airlines are estimated to have lost around Rs 700 crore due to higher fuel expenses and operational complications that came with longer routes many of their flights were forced to take. Air India was the worst affected Indian carrier at the time, as it operated more west-bound international flights than other airlines.

Moreover, it was and continues to be the only Indian airline that operates long-haul and ultra-long-haul flights to Europe and North America. Air India, now a Tata group entity, is understood to have informed the government that the Pakistani airspace closure is estimated to cost the airline around $600 million on an annualised basis. Over the past few years, other Indian airlines—particularly IndiGo—have also expanded their international networks to include various destinations that can be served by their existing fleets that mainly comprises narrow-body jets. IndiGo is the only Indian airline that was flying to destinations in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Turkey.