February 07 2020
Most European airlines have stopped flying their planes over Iran since the Pasdaran shot a Ukrainian aircraft out of the sky, killing all 176 aboard.
This will cost Iran some foreign exchange—since planes flying over a country must pay passage fees. The regime has been actively promoting itself the last few years as a safer place for overflights, ever since a plane flying to the north of Iran and over Afghanistan was shot down over Ukraine by Russians. Those days are over.
Now most flights between Europe and Southeast Asia take one of three routes to avoid Iran—north over Ukraine, the Caspian and Afghanistan; west over Iraq and the Indian Ocean; and south across Saudi Arabia and the Indian Ocean.
There is a certain irony that major airlines are finding Ukrainian and Iraqi airspace to be safer than Iranian airspace.
Radar tracks of flights now seem to show a doughnut hole where Iran is, with planes clustered all around it, but few over it.
Ironically, the planes flying over Iran are mostly Arab. Qatar Airways, Emirates, Etihad Airways, flydubai, Kuwait Airways and Gulf Air all still use Iranian airspace.
In mid-January, many Iranian news outlets carried very similar stories telling the Iranian public about all the airlines that were flying through Iranian airspace. Most of them ignored the fact that European and South Asian airlines had largely canceled their use of Iranian air corridors or mentioned that only briefly deep into their stories.
On January 16, the EU Aviation Safety Agency said it was safe fly to over Iran as long as the altitude was more than 25,000 feet, well above normal air defense missile altitudes. On January 23, Dutch carrier KLM became the first airline to announce it would resume flights over Iran—but not to airports in Iran. Iranian media—which did not report when KLM stopped flying over Iran—widely carried stories about its reversal.
Other airlines have not resumed flights over Iran but are expected to do so now that the EU allows it. However, they will not be landing at airports in the Islamic Republic.
