Which scheduled flight is the most impacted by the Russia/Ukraine air border closure?
Given the recent invasion into Ukraine, all Western airlines were banned from Russian space and cannot use Ukrainian airspace for obvious reasons. A similar ban applies to Russian airlines flying over Western airspace. Which scheduled flight was the most affected by this closure? To clarify:
- The flight in question must be regularly scheduled
- It must be a passenger flight
- The flight route must be visible on FlightAware, FlightStats or a similar website
- Distance will be judged by the deviation between the shortest possible flight route and the one taken in practice
- The flight must be scheduled to/from/within Russia or normally scheduled to fly over Russian/Ukrainian airspace.
- Flights which are now forced to make a fuel stop count too.
It’s now been 3 weeks since the start of the conflict so I assume airlines were able to update their routes by now.
Best Answer
I'll kick off with Finnair flight AY74 from Tokyo to Helsinki. Scheduled flight time used to be 10:15, now it's taking around 13 hours.
You can somewhat approximate this route in the Great Circle mapper by using HEL-LYR-WAA-UHPX-NRT. I also added HEL-BUD-TBS-ULN-NRT as a Southern route as well, and the direct flight.
Based on the mapper the NRT-HEL direct distance was around 4900 miles, the new Northern route is approximately 6700 miles, while the Southern route avoiding Russia and Ukraine through Hungary->Georgia->Mongolia would be around 7100-7200 miles.
Interestingly, the new polar routing is essentially the same as the one Finnair pioneered in the early 1980s, when it became the first airline to fly direct from Europe to Asia, before the Soviet Union permitted overflights.
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Are flights affected by Ukraine and Russia?
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has profoundly affected the air travel process. Up to this point, all European Union Member States, as well as Albania, Switzerland, Canada, Norway, and the United Kingdom, have banned airlines of Russia from entering their airspace.Does the war in Ukraine affect air travel?
Impact on air passenger trafficThe Ukrainian airspace is closed, putting a halt to the movements by air of roughly 3.3% of total air passenger traffic in Europe, and to 0.8% of total traffic globally, as per 2021.What airlines have stopped flying Russia?
- airBaltic. The Latvian airline has cancelled all of its flights to Russia until the end of May. ...
- Austrian Airlines. Austrian Airlines says it has suspended all flights to Ukraine until 26 March. ...
- British Airways. ...
- flydubai. ...
- Jet2. ...
- KLM. ...
- LOT Polish Airlines. ...
- Lufthansa.
Is Emirates flying over Ukraine?
Emirates' partner airlines \u2013 flydubai and S7 \u2011 have suspended certain flights to Russia, Ukraine and Belarus due to the closure of airspace over these areas. Customers booked to fly to these cities as their final destinations will not be accepted for boarding at their point of origin.Russia-Ukraine Conflict: Russia bans flight from 36 airlines | Ukraine under attack | English News
More answers regarding which scheduled flight is the most impacted by the Russia/Ukraine air border closure?
Answer 2
In terms of proportional increase rather than absolute increase, I expect the worst-hit flight is Kaliningrad-Minsk, operated by Belavia as flight B2947/B2948 and by Pegas Fly as flight EO379/EO380. The great-circle route between the two is only 470 km, but the routing to avoid closed airspace increases that to over 1600 km, for a factor of 3.4.
It's not clear if this counts, though: despite being regularly scheduled, it doesn't appear to be regularly operated: neither FlightRadar24 nor FlightAware has any information about recently-scheduled flights, not even a mention of completion or cancelation.
For a more-frequently-flown example, Kaliningrad-Moscow sees a substantial increase. The great-circle distance is 1070 km, but flight AFL1007 recently detoured for a total flight distance of around 1700 km, a factor of 1.6.
Answer 3
The question is which flight is most impacted.
UA867/UA868 - SFO to DEL and DEL to SFO, have both been canceled since the conflict started, as United does not have any aircraft that are capable of making the flight without flying over Russia/Ukraine.
The flights listed in the other answers have had their flight times increased, but from the perspective of the flight, fairly clearly being canceled is more of an impact than a longer route!
(There are likely other flights that have also been canceled for the same reason, this is just one that springs to mind)
Answer 4
CNN has an infographic on that question: Seoul to Helinsky is the most impacted route mentioned in their graphic, in terms of absolute time increase (4h8min).
Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Images: Sergey Platonov, Arnauld Van Wambeke, Pixabay, Ahmed Muntasir