How global conflict's changing air travel

Summary

Podcast Summary — Business Daily (BBC World Service)

Episode: How global conflict's changing air travel
Date: January 26, 2026
Host: Rick Kelsey

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Overview

This episode of Business Daily investigates how expanding zones of conflict are reshaping commercial air travel worldwide. With significant airspace closures, particularly over Russia and Ukraine, airlines face rising costs, longer flight times, operational stresses, and environmental consequences. Guests include risk analysts, aviation experts, travel writers, and pilots—each offering insight into the operational, economic, and environmental ripple effects born out of these new realities in the sky.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Shrinking Airspace and Flight Re-Routing

• Airspace closures: Due to the Ukraine war and associated sanctions, vast portions of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian airspace are closed to many carriers, forcing airlines to plot new, often circuitous routes.
• Historical echo: Some routes, such as Tokyo to London, now resemble flight paths from the 1970s, taking the polar route over Alaska to avoid Russian airspace.
  • “This route going over Alaska is common again like it was in the 1970s when it used to stop to refuel. But now it’s often to avoid Russian airspace due to the Ukraine war.” — Rick Kelsey (02:45)

2. Rising Costs: Economic Impact for Airlines and Passengers

• Increased journey times: Lufthansa reports typical detours adding 1–2 hours to long-haul flights.
• Direct cost implications:
  • “Each additional minute of flight time leads to an average increase in passenger fares of £1.20, around $1.60.” — Rick Kelsey (05:01)
  • According to the German Aerospace Center, Finnair’s Helsinki–Tokyo route is now 3,100 km longer, taking an additional 3.5 hours.
• Ripple effect on fares and award travel: Airlines pass the increased operational costs onto consumers, both in ticket prices and in reduced availability of points-based redemptions.
  • “These airlines are now faced with couple hours extra crew and fuel costs in each direction, and somebody has to account for that… airlines have higher costs, they pass them on.” — Gilbert Ott (11:14)

3. Environmental Consequences

• Significant emission increases: Longer flight routes mean planes burn more fuel.
  • “According to our forecast, if the war in Ukraine will be continuing next year, then the emissions will be increased up to 20% in total.” — Dr. Victoria Ivanikova (07:20)
• 2010s–2020s trend: As airspace closures grow, this is the largest segregation of airspace since WWII, now affecting around 18 million square kilometers globally.
  • “The total area of closed or restricted in use airspace currently is around 18 million square kilometers, which is the biggest airspace segregation since the Second World War.” — Dr. Victoria Ivanikova (06:40)

4. Operational and Supply Chain Impacts

• Aircraft utilization challenges: Longer routes disrupt scheduling and aircraft turnaround, increasing stress on already strained supply chains (e.g., delayed aircraft deliveries such as the Boeing 777X).
  • “If you had a flight scheduled for 6am and that plane can’t get back until 8 or 9am now what do you do? And that gets into some of the supply chain issues airlines have dealt with...” — Gilbert Ott (10:15)
• Constraints on direct flights: For business travelers, particularly between Europe/North America and Asia, direct flights take significantly longer and are less available.

5. Planning and Risk Assessment: The Pilot’s View

• Flight planning under conflict: Modern software and intelligence sources inform pilots and airlines of restricted zones, with alternative routes pre-planned for safety.
  • “The states involved in the conflict have a duty to advise aviation authorities that it’s no longer either safe to route over the country or maybe to take just certain routes. … The flight plan that is produced for you… should keep you clear of all those conflict zones. But it will probably add time, it will add fuel...” — Mike Thrower (16:53)
• History of adaptation: Former pilot Mike Thrower speaks to the continuity of such challenges with anecdotes from the Vietnam War, 9/11, and natural events like volcanic eruptions.

6. Who Feels the Pain Most?

• Regional disparities: U.S., European, and Asian carriers on long haul routes between North America, Asia, and Europe are the most affected.
  • “The most affected airline is Finnair due to its hub located very close to the Russian border.” — Dr. Victoria Ivanikova (19:15)
• Operational costs: Depending on the airline and aircraft, operating costs have increased by 5–15% on the most affected long-hauls.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the scale of conflict-related airspace closures:
  “Areas affected by armed fighting have grown by 89% over the past five years, one and a half times the size of the European Union.”
  — Rick Kelsey (03:57)

• On profits and fare hikes:
  “Aviation has always been a business on the edge financially and as soon as extra cost is introduced, they have to pass it on to the consumer.”
  — Mike Thrower (17:57)

• Knock-on effects for frequent flyers:
  “An airline… would be less likely to make a seat available with points because there’s so much more pressure to create that profitability.”
  — Gilbert Ott (11:45)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:18] — Episode intro, airspace shrinking, rising fares
• [02:24] — First-person account of polar re-routing (Tokyo–London)
• [03:13] — Hugo Brennan on conflict mapping and airspace closures
• [05:01] — Cost per minute increases explained, Lufthansa detours
• [06:40] — Dr. Victoria Ivanikova on historic segregation of airspace
• [07:20] — Environmental cost: predicted 20% increase in emissions
• [08:14] — Gilbert Ott on polar routes’ historic importance, current flight disruptions
• [11:14] — How rising costs affect ticket prices and reward travel
• [15:14] — Mike Thrower shares historical perspective on managing conflict zones
• [16:53] — How pilots and airlines use intelligence to adjust to evolving risks
• [18:28] — Expert summary of which airlines/regions are most impacted

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Conclusion

Global conflict today has led to a historic reshaping of our skies: travel is longer, pricier, and less environmentally friendly. Airlines, travelers, and the environment absorb the brunt of these changes, with pilots and planners having to nimbly adapt to evolving risks. Despite advances in flight planning and technology, the fundamental reality holds—airlines operate on razor-thin margins, and shocks are quickly felt by passengers. As host Rick Kelsey concludes, while affordable fares may still exist, complex geopolitics mean your next trip could take you much farther afield than you expected.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Rick Kelsey. Today, the amount of airspace available to fly in is shrinking.

[C]

Each additional minute of flight time lead to an average fare increase of around $1.50.

[B]

Wow. Conflict has changed flight routes both in time and cost.

[D]

You know, you're typically wanting to turn around an international aircraft in three hours for a long haul flight. If you had a flight scheduled for 6am and that plane can't get back until 8 or 9am now what do you do? And that gets into some of the supply chain issues airlines have dealt with.

[B]

It's also impacting the environment and how we travel the planet.

[E]

There are political ripple effects beyond the conflict zones themselves, whether that's Russian aircraft not allowed to fly through EU airspace, for example, as a result of Western sanctions.

[B]

We'll speak with the pilots dealing with the new flight paths and look at the effect on airlines and passengers.

[F]

That's exactly what happens. The costs get passed on. I mean, aviation has always been a business on the edge financially.

[B]

How conflict is changing our skies all coming up in today's Business Daily. I'm starting the show at the top of the world. I'm flying over the North Pole. The ground speed is 589 miles per hour. The altitude is 33,000ft. And looking out of the wind. I can just see drifting sea ice and clear skies well into the distance. It's mesmeric. The flight is from Tokyo to London and this route going over Alaska is common again like it was in the 1970s when it used to stop to refuel. But now it's often to avoid Russian airspace due to the Ukraine war. And this is not the only route that's changed.

[E]

Each airlines will take know individual kind of risk assessments on, on that but certainly you know, if you have 4.9% of you know, the world of the six permanently inhabited continents, territory in conflict that's you know, significant areas of the world where there is a decision to be made or whether it is safe to fly over those zones.

[B]

Hugo Brennan works for risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft who map global conflict.

[E]

And that's on the basis, you know, Ukrainian attacks on Russia, particularly on Russian energy infrastructure that's using some of the Western supplied weaponry, Storm Shadow missiles and the like. You see the really big increase in kind of Russian territory, still a tiny proportion of Russia because it's a huge, huge country. That was one notable takeaway.

[B]

Lufthansa, one of the world's largest airline groups has told BBC Business Daily that airspace closures due to war zones are now forcing substantial rerouting of flights. The German based company says the ban on using Russian and Ukrainian airspace and is having a measurable cost impact on its long haul network with typical detours of one to two hours. The conflict intensity report shows that areas affected by armed fighting have grown by 89% over the past five years, one and a half times the size of the European Union. That's 6.6 million square kilometers now affected by conflict. Risk intelligence analyst Hugo Brennan.

[E]

Again, there is the direct impact of spreading conflict, but there are these sort of vast array of indirect consequences be that related to supply chain. So if you take the airline example, again, if there was a conflict broke out in a new jurisdiction that's not currently in conflict, does that have an implication for your supply chain? Does it disrupt your supply chain?

[B]

Each additional minute of flight time leads to an average increase in passenger fares of £1.20, around $1.60 according to the aviation experts at the German Aerospace Center. And longer flights not only increase cost, they also mean more emissions from planes. Dr. Victoria Ivanikova is Assistant professor in Aviation Management at Dublin City University. Her research shows Finnair's route from Helsinki to Tokyo is about 3,100km longer. Now it's routed around Russia and Ukrainian airspace and takes 3.5 hours longer to operate.

[C]

So in 2025, lines are flying more longer and more complicated routes. Since February 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian airspace was closed due to security and safety reasons. And the Russian airspace was limited in use due to the in response to the sanctions of US and EU carriers. And this caused the airlines to seek for an alternative routes to overfly closed Ukrainian airspace and limited and use Russian airspace and also Belarusian airspace. So if we will look on the flight radar 2024, we can see that aircraft are flying Russian airspace, Ukrainian airspace, and there are some points with conflict in the Middle east. And the total area of closed or restricted in use airspace currently is around 18 million square kilometers, which is the biggest airspace segregation since the Second World War. And obviously the longer flight time, more fuel burn, more emissions, more airline operating costs, it's significant.

[B]

I mean, we hear there about the cost to you and I to travel, but what about the environmental cost from using all this extra fuel?

[C]

VICTORIA so we all know that we want to protect our environment from the negative impact of emissions. And extended routes pushed up emissions. And we did a forecast. According to our forecast, if the war in Ukraine will be continuing next year, then the emissions will be increased up to 20% in total.

[B]

Globally, most Western airlines are now banned from flying over Russia, forcing them to fly longer routes. British Airways and Virgin Atlantic have both dropped direct flights between London and Beijing. Gilbert Ott runs the travel blog God Save the Points, which helps people get low price airfares using credit, air miles and credit cards. He agrees that the size of Russia has caused airlines huge problems. This is not new, this flight issue. This has been going on for years. Wherever there's been a significant conflict around the world, airlines and navigation systems have had to plan alternative routes.

[D]

Absolutely. And to put it lightly, it's a nightmare for everybody involved. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a more inconvenient place for conflict in terms of global long haul flying. You know, as most people know, many of the advancements in air travel in the last 60, 70 years have been using the polar routes. It's been how close to the North Pole can we go to cut off significant amounts of distance to shorten flight times. And now because so much of that does touch Russian airspace, we're having to go even further north or further south at the cost of time, fuel and profitability for a lot of airlines, frankly, some have had to stop or curtail their flying to certain regions because it's just too expensive right now.

[B]

So what kind of routes are we talking about that have been hit especially hard?

[D]

Yeah, so if you look at let's say London to Japan, that route now takes hours more than it was previously. Some carriers geographically are better placed to deal with that than others. Some who naturally would have flown you south with the connection also get away with being okay there. But for people with direct service, which, you know, most business travelers of course do prefer, it's, it's a long story now, you know, you're looking at a couple extra hours of flight time, crews who have to time out, you know, because of duty restrictions and then not to mention the fuel, the labor and the utilization of the aircraft. These are planes that typically could have been able to, let's say, do a 24 hour turn to Japan and now they're going over that 24 hour mark. That's tricky.

[B]

I see. So it has a knock on effect on the whereabouts and the supply of aircraft because you've got the longer flight times and the knock on effect that you've got with hiring people. But also the plane is in use on routes and times that it didn't used to be.

[D]

Exactly that. So, you know, whereas before, you know, you're typically wanting to turn around an international aircraft in three hours for a long haul flight, that's, you know, what you're looking to get out of something. But if you had a flight scheduled for 6am and that plane can't get back until 8 or 9am now what do you do? And that gets into some of the supply chain issues airlines have dealt with where deliveries haven't been quite as quick for some of the things that they've been after for a while. You know, use the, the Boeing 777X as an example. These were planes that slotted for delivery, you know, practically during COVID times. Now the first deliveries aren't going to be coming for another couple years. And so, you know, you have this, this challenge of I need to fly to Japan, but I also need an aircraft back because it has other responsibilities in my weekly schedule. And what do I do?

[B]

Well, one of your biggest jobs is saving people money and trying to get people points so they can fly to places for as cheap as possible. What's the knock on effect here for people's pockets?

[D]

It's significant, you know, because these airlines are now faced with couple hours extra crew and fuel costs in each direction and somebody has to account for that. And so if you are buying a ticket, you know, with cash, the ticket's going to be marginally more expensive. Of course, the market helps keep it somewhat in check. But airlines have higher costs, they pass them on. It's how every business works. And then with points. An airline you could say would be less likely to make a seat available with points because there's so much more pressure to create that profitability rather than kind of break even on a flight with these changes, with these restrictions in airspace, because you have to care so much about each flight going out with the maximum profitability. Let's say a place like a Japan is a very steady demand market. And so then it actually can sometimes impact people's ability to save money and be able to redeem some of their favorite vouchers or points to unlock.

[B]

I see what you're saying. So this has always been going on. It's just now we've got a different problem simply because of the size of Russia and how much airspace that takes out. Is that why this is such an issue?

[D]

Absolutely, absolutely. Connecting east to west, west to east. It's very difficult if you're going long haul to Asia to not be touching that airspace. And that is a significant piece of business travel. Especially as we talk now about the quantum computing and super chips and AI and all these advancements and car manufacturing. There are plenty of people who need to get back and forth between these geographies and it's not getting faster for them.

[B]

Travel expert Gilbert Ott. You're listening to BBC Business Daily from the BBC World Service. It's only getting every customer's order right. It's only a point of sale system connected by Spectrum fiber powered business Internet helping you track hundreds of secure transactions. And it's all backed by 24, seven US based customer support and local technicians. It's only everything.

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[B]

I'm Rick Kelsey and today I'm looking at the ongoing impact of global conflict on flight routes. There are some areas that have seen conflict reduced, such as Afghanistan and Libya, yet countries such as Colombia have seen the issue grow dramatically in the past 12 months, according to the new Conflict Intensity Index report. So how do airlines and pilots plan for affected routes? Mike Thrower was a captain at British Airways and is currently chairman of the British Airline Pilots Association.

[F]

I started flying in 1976 and ever since I started flying, there's always been conflict zones around the world. In more recent times, we've had things like the Iceland volcano, which required fairly quick action by the authorities and the airlines to sort that out. We had nine, 11, which shut down the whole of North American airspace. Vietnam War. I remember, I remember some of the guys I used to fly with and they'd done long haul flying in those days while the Vietnam War was going on and they used to route over the top of Vietnam and they said they could see, you know, bombers going in with wave after wave sort of bombing targets in Vietnam, which sounds crazy really now, but they'd experienced it on their flights down towards Australia, etc. So it's been around for, for a long time. And I think with modern flight planning systems, with the computers, it makes it quite easy in that sense for the airline to cope with the disruption. It just adds a big cost to their bottom line. I think that's the end of it. You described coming back over the North Pole from Japan. That was before we'd have flown over Siberia and it was probably two hours longer. I would suggest your route. Yes, it was London.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. How do navigational systems that you look at as a pilot, how do they plan for disruption and conflict that's going on as these areas that are on the ground expand?

[F]

So when you turn up for a flight, say from London to Singapore, you'll be presented with a flight plan, whether the airlines have a duty obviously to flight plan around areas of conflict. In fact, the states involved in the conflict have a duty to advise aviation authorities that it's no longer either safe to route over the country or maybe to take just certain routes. And the airlines themselves will have other information. I work for British Airways and I know they had high level input from the Secret Service type, intelligence gathering type networks about what they considered safe. So the flight plan that is produced for you, when you turn up for work, should keep you clear of all those conflict zones. But it will probably add time, it will add fuel more. Normally, air traffic control may have to vary that route so as you got nearer a conflict zone, they may have some more up to date information, for example, which require to take a slight deviation further away from the border or something like that. The costs get passed on. I mean, aviation has always been a business on the edge financially and as soon as extra cost is introduced, they have to pass it on to the consumer.

[B]

So who's feeling the pain the most? Here's Dr. Victoria Ivanikova, aviation management expert.

[C]

Again, this particularly impacted the U.S. and European carriers and Asian carriers. But all of them are doing the long haul routes between North America and Asia and Europe and Asia. So if you have a longer travel time, it means that you'll have more cost. For airlines, their longer travel implants on their more fuel or fuel burn correspondently, more salaries for crew, more expenses for maintenance. And all these are contributed parts of airline operating cost. And we can say that in total globally, the airline operating cost, particularly on the flights from North America to Asia, Europe to Asia have been increased up to 5, 15% depending on the airline and depending on the aircraft type. The most affected airline is Finnair due to its very close due to its hub located very close to the Russian border.

[B]

Aviation management expert Dr. Victoria Ivanikova. As the skies get busier, the impact of conflict restricting airspace is growing. But figures suggest until recently, airfares have changed little when taking into account inflation over the past 10 years. So you can still get deals, but the destination might be further away. That's it for this episode of Business Daily on the BBC World Service with me, Rick Kelsey. Thanks for listening and safe travels.

[G]

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