Why is the sky over Russia so important for international air traffic?

Before answering this question, let’s take a look at the map. There are more than two hundred countries on the modern political map of the world. International communication, including aviation, contributes to the strengthening of peaceful cooperation and the development of business ties between countries, regardless of their socio-political system. However, today we are interested in air traffic between two specific regions – East Asia, which includes China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, and Europe. In total, about 2.6 billion people live in these territories – a third of the world’s population.

Even more staggering is that each of these regions has a GDP of around $20 trillion. Together, these countries alone account for half of the global economy. The two most densely populated, developed and economically interconnected regions in the world, where the largest and most influential cities are located, are separated by only one country – Russia. It is safe to say that one state controls whether the inhabitants of Europe can get into Asia and vice versa, and for a long time they really could not. During the Cold War, flights of foreign aviation over the USSR, including civilian ones, were simply prohibited. Therefore, foreign airlines had to look for workarounds to fly past our country.

So, in the 1950s, a person who wanted to get from London to Tokyo as quickly as possible had to leave the British capital on a BOAC (later British Airways) plane, say, at 10 am on Friday and make stops in Rome, Beirut, Bahrain, Karachi, Kolkata, Yangon, Bangkok and Manila before finally arriving in Tokyo at 6am on Sunday. In total, it took him 36 hours to cover over 16,000 kilometers, while a direct flight would only be about 9,600 kilometers. And all this despite the fact that the passengers were transported by a late-model Comet jet. BOAC also had a cheaper, slower propeller-driven aircraft in its fleet that could leave London on Sunday and arrive in Tokyo only on Thursday, after 88 hours of flight. It was terribly long and inefficient, but a better way was soon discovered – to fly through the Arctic.

SAS, the leading carrier in the Nordic countries, is the first airline to develop multiple routes to fly over the Arctic. For the first time, such routes were used in order to quickly reach the west coast of the United States. However, to begin with, air carriers had to develop new flight and navigation systems to solve the problem of traditional magnetic compasses, which for some reason fell into disrepair in the Far North. In the 1950s, no commercial aircraft had the range to reach the US West Coast without stopping, but with the new SAS polar route, flying was indeed faster. The flight time from Copenhagen to Los Angeles has been reduced from 36 hours to 22 hours. Since SAS proved that commercial flights over the Arctic are very profitable and absolutely safe, other airlines quickly followed suit, opening new routes not only to the American west coast, but also to the Far East.

The most direct route from London to Tokyo is obviously over Siberia, but since this airspace was closed, the airlines had to take a different route – just turn around in the other direction.

In 1960, Anchorage, Alaska had only 40,000 people. Despite becoming a state only a year earlier, Alaska’s airport has become a critical stopover between Europe and Asia. The BOAC flight from London to Tokyo departed Heathrow International Airport at 1345, arrived in Anchorage nine and a half hours later, stopped for an hour to refuel, and then flew the remaining seven hours to Tokyo. All in all, the trip was scheduled to take only seventeen and a half hours, half of the time taken by the previous route. So, in the 1960s and 1970s, all major European carriers opened routes to the Far East through Anchorage. This tiny town in Alaska quickly became one of the most cosmopolitan places in the world, as passengers and flight crews from all over the planet were forced to stop there due to the city’s location.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia began issuing airspace permits to European and East Asian airlines. First, of course, we had to modernize and translate the entire air traffic control system into English. All international airline pilots and air traffic controllers around the world spoke English, but since there were practically no international flights over Russia, Russian air traffic controllers spoke only Russian. As soon as all the necessary changes were made, airlines literally poured from Europe to Asia via Siberia. This left Anchorage virtually abandoned. It is all the more sad that in 1982 a large and modern international terminal was built at the airport to serve the entire flow of aircraft passing through the airport, but then, less than ten years later, all the airlines that kept the airport busy left en masse or, if you like, flew away. Thus, the inhabitants of Anchorage shared the opinion of many inhabitants of the USSR that it would be better if the Union did not disintegrate.

Russia meanwhile truly prospered thanks to the opening of its airspace. Flights to Asia through Siberia saved airlines a huge amount of time and money – in our country they understood this very well and charged companies more than a solid percentage. Russia has unlimited power in controlling such a gigantic airspace, and it actively uses it for its own national interests. The 133 countries that are members of the International Civil Aviation Organization have signed a transit agreement that essentially allows any airline from any country to fly through the airspace of another signatory to the agreement. However, Russia did not do this, so our country has the right to choose which country’s airlines can fly through Russian airspace. The country is ready to use its airspace as a geopolitical lever of pressure – in 2014, Russia intended to close its airspace to European Union airlines in response to sanctions; in 2017, the Russian Federation threatened to close the airspace to a Dutch airline due to the reduction of seats for Russian carriers at Schiphol Airport. Despite all the contradictions, the shortest route through Siberia was open, and it annually saved both carriers and millions of passengers both time and money.

However, in 2022, the Federal Air Transport Agency banned flights over Russia without special permission from aircraft from 36 countries, including from the EU and Canada. The restriction was introduced in response to the closure of airspace for Russian aircraft.

And now, after more than 30 years of “air freedom”, international airlines again need to try to go around the country that occupies a third of the entire Eurasian continent, or “blow off the dust” from that small airport in Anchorage, which has the opportunity to once again become the most important transport hub that connects Europe and Asia.

At the same time, new routes force passengers and crew to spend more time in the air, travel longer distances and burn more fuel, all of which inevitably increase emissions and increase aircraft maintenance costs. Thus, the world aviation really considers the losses from the sky over Russia that is closed to them.

Daniel Prilepsky.

Photo source: Yandex. Images