Safety in a fragmented sky

The outbreak of the Iran war has once again exposed the vulnerability of global aviation to geopolitical shocks. As airlines grapple with widespread rerouting, flight suspensions and disruption on a scale not seen since the Covid-19 pandemic, a fundamental question has come into focus: is the industry’s safety framework equipped for an increasingly volatile and fragmented airspace? Airlines now operate in a risk environment shaped by misidentification in conflict zones, GPS interference and the strain of narrowing flight corridors. As conflicts become more frequent and unpredictable, the industry must confront whether its safety architecture is fit for this new reality. THE CRISIS UNFOLDS On February 28, the United States and Israel launched surprise airstrikes on multiple sites across Iran. Iran responded swiftly, unleashing retaliatory drone and missile strikes against Israel, US military bases, and US-allied countries across the region. Gulf states, which have long positioned themselves as neutral commercial hubs at the crossroads of global aviation, found themselves caught in the crossfire. Within hours, at least eight countries, including Iran, Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, declared their airspace closed. The disruption that followed was swift and severe. According to Cirium data, cancellation rates peaked above 65 percent within the first days of the conflict, with more than 2,300 daily departures grounded. Mass suspensions cascaded across carriers globally. Cathay Pacific cancelled all flights to and from Dubai and Riyadh, extending the suspension through 30 June, while Singapore Airlines halted services to Dubai until the end of May. The scale was not limited to airlines with Middle East routes. As Gulf hubs function as connection points for journeys across the globe, the disruption rippled outward to affect routes across Europe and Asia. Regulators moved on the same day. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency issued Conflict Zone Information Bulletin (CZIB) 2026-03-R6, advising operators to avoid operating across a broad swathe of Middle Eastern airspace, including Iran, Iraq and Israel, as well as neighbouring Gulf states such as Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The bulletin cited an acute danger: the possession of all-altitude capable air defence systems, cruise and ballistic missiles makes the entire affected airspace vulnerable to what EASA termed “spill-over risks, misidentification, miscalculation and failure of interception procedures.” The CZIB has since been extended, with its validity running through late April 2026. The speed of the industry’s reaction—including sovereign states, regulators, and the airlines— highlighted both increased awareness of geopolitical risks and the operational strain they create. “Airspace closures and flight cancellations can happen quickly and unpredictably in today’s volatile geopolitical landscape, leaving operators scrambling to reroute flights and assess risk,” according to Matthew Borie, chief intelligence officer of Osprey Flight Solutions. Borie described the current environment as “the new normal”—a stark contrast, he notes, to the landscape of two decades ago. International aircraft operators must now build flexibility into their global routing decisions to account for conflict zones, geopolitical instability and war risk insurance considerations as a matter of routine, not exception. A NARROWING SKY But the Iran war did not introduce these pressures. It inherited them. The rerouting options available to operators were already narrowing before the first strike on 28 February. Borie identifies three remaining corridors for the long-haul routes connecting Europe and Asia: the polar route via Russian airspace, largely unavailable to Western carriers since the Russia-Ukraine War in 2022; routes over the Caucasus and Central Asia; and routes over the Middle East and Gulf—now the most severely affected by the current conflict. “These routings all create further issues in terms of added time, increased fuel costs, limited divert options and additional conflict zone risks,” he said. As traffic concentrates onto fewer routes, the operational strain spreads and safety risks escalate. “When you only have a few corridors, air traffic control gets very crowded, overwhelmed,” said Eric Schouten, CEO & Founder of Dyami Security Intelligence. “The air traffic control community has to work really hard. Long hours, fatigue kicks in. That’s something that truly needs to be taken into account.” GPS interference adds a further layer of risk. Spoofing, which transmits counterfeit satellite signals that appear valid until an aircraft’s position has diverged dangerously from its actual location, has become an increasingly common threat in and around conflict zones, with IATA reporting a 220 percent increase in GPS signal loss events between 2021 and 2024. Unlike jamming, which alerts crews through an immediate loss of signal, spoofing can go undetected until it is too late. (PHOTO: Shutterstock) A STRAINED SAFETY SYSTEM These operational pressures are the visible face of a deeper, systemic safety problem—one the industry has been grappling with since MH17 fundamentally changed how aviation thinks about conflict zones. Schouten, who was directly involved in establishing the Dutch national expert group for overflight of conflict zones after MH17, describes MH17’s impact in stark terms. “I always compare it with what 9/11 did for airport security. The whole system changed,” he said. Before MH17, commercial airlines routinely flew over conflict zones at cruising altitude, assuming height alone provided sufficient protection. “And then all of a sudden you had to take misidentification into account—weapon systems that can still take you down because they operate at high altitudes,” Schouten said. MH17 was struck at approximately 33,000 feet, an open airspace for civil aircraft. Three days before the disaster, Ukrainian authority had increased the upper limit of restricted airspace imposed on civil aviation to 32,000 feet but had not closed the airspace entirely. The Dutch Safety Board’s investigation found that almost all airlines using routes over the conflict zone continued to do so as the armed conflict already expanded, and that not a single state or international organisation had explicitly warned of the risks. “The crash of MH17 demonstrates that an unrestricted airspace is not, by definition, safe if the state managing the airspace is dealing with an armed conflict,” the investigation concluded. The industry’s longstanding safety framework relies on states to assess risks and declare their airspace open, restricted or closed, supported by oversight from global and national regulators. However, MH17 revealed that this system could malfunction, especially when the flight route crosses conflict zones. What followed was an industry-wide scramble. ICAO led one of the initial efforts to encourage states to share threat information via the Conflict Zone Information Repository (CZIR) but it proved difficult to sustain. “At the ICAO level, you cannot finger-point at another country,” Schouten said. “So that whole system failed within a couple of months.” A more decentralised approach emerged: governments and regulators were expected to issue their own warnings, while operators conducted independent risk assessments. In Europe, this produced mechanisms such as the EASA CZIB. But the system remains uneven across jurisdictions. The inadequacy of that framework was exposed again on January 8, 2020, when Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 departed Tehran into airspace that was, by every legal measure, open for business—and was struck by two Iranian surface-to-air missiles minutes later, killing all 176 on board. The airspace had been legal to fly. It had not been safe. That gap between what is legally permitted under the current regulation and what is genuinely safe remains the central unresolved tension in how the industry manages conflict zone risk today. PRESSURE TO FLY The gap is widening under commercial and political pressure. “That’s something we truly see happening in the Middle East right now, especially around the UAE,” said Schouten. Following a brief shutdown after the outbreak of the Iran war, parts of the Gulf—including the UAE and Oman—moved quickly to reopen their airspace. On March 3, the UAE’s Minister of Economy and Tourism announced that safe air corridors had been established in coordination with neighbouring countries, Gulf Cooperation Council states and ICAO. Some Middle Eastern carriers resumed operations at reduced capacity along designated corridors. Operations saw a broader recovery after the US and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire on April 7, though no permanent agreement had been reached between the two countries. Schouten argued that, in practice, there is no such thing as a truly “safe corridor.” “There are still missiles and drones coming into the region, and there’s still air defence activity,” he said. “But there is commercial and political pressure from countries saying, ‘Hey, it’s perfectly fine. We have it under control.’” The problem, Schouten adds, extends beyond the current conflict. He explained that the risk is not confined to the Middle East. There are risks around Armenia and Azerbaijan, China and Taiwan, North Korea, etc. “More and more spots are of concern,” he said. Emerging conflicts, by definition, do not come with advance warning. “It’s all about the conflicts that you don’t read about in the newspaper—and then all of a sudden a plane gets shot down.” “In the end, an aircraft operator is responsible for its own risk acceptance,” Schouten said. “And that is tough sometimes.” THE ROAD AHEAD The industry’s response is continuing to evolve. Borie argues that operators, regulators and security organisations must move toward a proactive, intelligence-led model—one built on real-time threat analysis, collaborative risk-sharing and adaptive flight planning rather than reactive compliance. ICAO is stepping up efforts to strengthen the global framework. At its 2025 Assembly, the organisation adopted updated global safety and security frameworks that specifically address risks such as flights over conflict zones, GPS interference and cybersecurity threats, aimed at strengthening global safety coordination and reducing aviation risk. The industry is also working to improve information-sharing mechanisms. Platforms such as Safe Airspace have emerged to support the kind of real-time intelligence exchange that earlier ICAO initiatives struggled to achieve, offering operators more independent and timely risk assessments. The ceasefire may hold. Airspace may reopen. But risks persist. Schouten warned that every airline and aircraft operator should have a proper risk management capability. “A lot of people do not have a proper intelligence picture,” he said. “They base decisions on gut feeling, hearsay, or media reports, without having a good network or proper risk assessments—that scares me.” For Editorial Inquiries Contact: Editor Matt Driskill at [email protected] For Advertising Inquiries Contact: Head of Sales Sally Passey at [email protected]