Earlier this month, British Airways announced it would suspend its service between London and Beijing starting in October and lasting at least until November 2025.
It is the latest in a string of Western airlines suspending routes between the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. Virgin Atlantic is set to slash its sole route to mainland China in the fall, which it attributes to costly diversions due to limits on Russian airspace.
Since the war in Ukraine began, Western carriers have flown south of Russia through much of the Middle East as a way to avoid Russian airspace. But amid recent escalations with Israel and Iran, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for airlines to avoid contentious conflict zones and the inherent risks that come along with it.
In recent months, both Iran and Israel have been accused of using GPS spoofing – a practice that sends inaccurate location signals to satellites in an effort to deter attacks away from civilian targets on the ground.
However, by doing so, GPS spoofing also impacts average people who rely every day on GPS systems like food delivery apps and plane navigation systems. That puts airline pilots in a dangerous position because in some cases it has meant that aircraft are flying blind, relying solely on visible landmarks rather than a global positioning system (GPS).
In March, a Turkish airliner bound for Beirut, Lebanon, had to turn around after it was unable to land because of a spoofed signal.
In July, the Lebanese Ministry of Telecommunications issued a complaint to the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union (ITU) over Israel’s use of the tech, which it employed to block Hezbollah attacks.
“It was always pretty rare to experience any sort of jamming or spoofing. You might see a drop out of GPS, but it’s been almost unheard of to see a position spoof. That’s changed recently,” Ken Munro, partner at Pen Test Partners, a cybersecurity consulting firm, told Al Jazeera.
OpsGroup – which monitors risks across the aviation industry sector – found a 400 percent increase in spoofing incidents in recent months, impacting 900 flights a day on average.
Earlier this year, the US aviation regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration, issued a warning to pilots about the technology when flying around conflict zones. The FAA urged pilots not to rely on GPS systems while flying in such areas.
Amid increased escalations in tensions that now involve Iran, which has also been accused of using the tech and disrupting civilian aircraft in the process, airlines are backing out of the region.
“Civilian airlines have had to rapidly develop procedures for dealing with this,” Munro said.
Several airlines have begun temporarily pulling out of the region. Delta and United temporarily suspended flights to Tel Aviv. LOT and Aegean Airlines suspended flights into Beirut as well. Others including Lufthansa also suspended flights to Amman, Jordan.
British and Egyptian regulators have asked carriers from their respective countries to avoid Lebanese airspace.
Jordanian officials have asked airlines flying into the country to have extra reserve fuel as escalations could cause some flights to be diverted.
Security concerns
“The rationale is safety,” Bijan Vasigh, professor of economics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, told Al Jazeera. “We have many examples of mishaps that have cost the lives of passengers. Israel shot down a Libyan airliner in 1973, Iran shot down a Ukrainian airliner in 2020 and Russia shot down a Korean airliner in 1983 and so forth. The airlines rightfully are trying to take a proactive role in order to protect passengers.”
But this also impacts traffic that crosses the region. One of the most vital routes between Europe and the Middle East is in the airspace over northern Iraq, straddling the border with Iran.
In September 2023, there were multiple reports of planes losing GPS along this route, including a business jet flight between Europe and Dubai, which almost trended into sensitive Iranian airspace without clearance.
Around that time, the OpsGroup reported that Iran threatened to shoot down an aircraft that entered Iranian airspace without clearance. It’s not certain it was the same flight. In 2020, Iran accidently shot down a Ukrainian airliner, killing all 176 people on board. Iran sentenced 10 members of the armed forces to prison for shooting down the aircraft. The commander received a 13-year sentence, and the other defendants faced one to three years behind bars.
In recent weeks, amid the escalating conflict with Israel, carriers including Singapore Airlines and Finnair have announced they would avoid Iranian airspace, citing security concerns. Finnair said in its announcement in April that the move could extend flight times to and from Doha, Qatar.
A Finnair spokesperson told Al Jazeera in a statement that the move has extended flight times by an hour.
This has been a double-edged sword for Iran in particular. Airlines pay countries to use their airspace under what is known as overflight charges. In 2020, Iran began courting international airlines to use its airspace to bring in more money and offered as much as 50 percent discounts to airlines if they did.
Russia has also been accused of using GPS spoofing that has interfered with flights in neighbouring countries like Lithuania and Estonia. In April, Finnair temporarily suspended a route to Tartu in Estonia, not far from the Russian border, for this reason.
Chinese airlines step in
But not all airlines are restricted from Russian airspace, and its GPS spoofing tactics have not deterred carriers from countries with closer diplomatic ties to Moscow. That means that some Middle Eastern and Asian carriers have a strategic advantage and Chinese airlines in particular have been reaping the benefits.
“If you’re a European airline and you’re flying from London or Frankfurt to Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia, you would typically fly over Russian airspace. You can no longer do that,” John Grant, chief analyst at OAG Aviation, a data analytics and intelligence firm, told Al Jazeera.
With no restrictions for Middle Eastern and Asian carriers in Russian airspace, they can continue these key routes like London to Beijing without any competition in the market and without the same worries over GPS spoofing in and around Iran, Israel and their neighbours.
“European carriers have had to add three to five hours round trip in some cases, skyrocketing the cost. That’s a price tag the Chinese carriers are not having to pay,” Grant said.
Chinese airlines have continued to expand coverage in the West. In June, Air China opened new flights to London airports as British Airways was set to pull out of the Chinese capital altogether.
Because Chinese airlines including Air China and China Southern are able to use Russian airspace, their flight time is at least an hour shorter than the British Airways route, according to data from Flightradar24.
“One jumbo jet aircraft like a 787, 777, Airbus A380 consumes about 40,000 gallons [about 151,415 litres] of gas. If a carrier increases the distance by 10 percent, one flight would be about $12,000 more expensive just in fuel costs alone. Therefore, if you are adding a little bit more, you are making that route economically unjustifiable,” Vasigh explained.
China Eastern Airlines, Air China, China Southern Airlines, Juneyao Airlines and Shanghai Airlines all added Europe-bound routes this summer amid a clear increase in demand. Juneyao in particular has witness a surge in growth, seeing flight frequency surge more than 182 percent from Europe just in the last year, according to OAG.
“Companies regularly assess the economics of their flight paths, weighing factors such as fuel costs, flight times, competitive advantage, and market access against potential risks,” Vasigh said. “Shorter routes over Russia often mean reduced fuel consumption and faster travel times, which can lead to better aircraft utilisation and potentially more flights per day. This can offer a significant competitive edge, especially on Europe-Asia routes.”
Pushback
As the administration of US President Joe Biden has approved more flights from China on Chinese airlines – albeit still well below pre-COVID levels – some lawmakers have objected.
Congressional Representative Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin, and Democrat Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi from Illinois penned a letter urging the Biden administration not to allow for any further expansions with carriers that operate in Russian airspace, citing an unfair market advantage. (The latest approvals were not scheduled to fly over Russian airspace, however.)
The pushback is echoed by other global carriers who want the same restrictions from the European Union. Air France-KLM CEO Ben Smith has been long up in arms about this, saying that flights over Russia have an unfair competitive advantage and should be banned from landing in Europe.
The trade group Airlines for America said that avoiding Russian airspace costs the airline industry in the US $2bn in lost revenue annually.
At the same time, it is a hindrance to Russia’s economy, too. Prior to its attack on Ukraine and the sanctions that subsequently followed, the global airline industry brought in $1.7bn in annual revenue to Russia. It has offset some of that loss by increasing overflight charges by 20 percent from those that continue to use its airspace.
But with coveted routes like London to Beijing now a financial maze for Western carriers, for Chinese carriers, that overflight charge is a price worth paying to have more control over a route.
With tensions from Russia and Ukraine to Israel and Iran growing rather than slowing, it is not clear if and when there will be a return to the status quo.
“Someone has asked me before if I’ve ever seen such a change of this nature in the market, where airspace this large has been closed for so long. The answer is no,” Grant of OAG Aviation said.
“It’s having an impact on many airlines who are having to change the way they operate to work their way through these times.”
