It is shortly before 7pm on Monday and the usual steady stream of aircraft are heading south towards Abu Dhabi and Dubai from destinations across Europe.
Emirates flight EK102 from Milan descends to about 8,000 metres as it makes its final turn over the Arabian Gulf, ready for its final approach into Dubai.
Close behind, still at cruising altitude, is Etihad’s EY28, bound for Abu Dhabi from Edinburgh. An Air Berlin flight from Stuttgart to Abu Dhabi is next in line.
For all intents and purposes, it is business as usual for the airline industry in the busy Gulf. But a glance at any one of the real-time global aircraft tracking sites tells another story.
Entire swathes of the conflict-ridden Middle East are now no-fly zones for the world’s commercial airlines. Instead of taking the traditional direct route to and from the Gulf, which is usually across Syrian and Iraqi airspace, most aircraft are now being funnelled over Iran.
This is bad news for the economy of Iraq, says David Kaminsky-Morrow, air transport editor for Flight International magazine, but good news for Iran.
All countries levy navigation charges on aircraft that pass through their airspace, and now, Iran is reaping what Iraq has lost – and such payments are exempt from international sanctions.
This time last year, Iran Daily reported that the number of aircraft passing through Iranian airspace had increased by 32 per cent in the six months to October last year – a trend that has continued since.
One Sunday in October last year, there were 1,015 “overflights”, compared with 559 a year earlier. A rapid rise in overflights was seen in August following a series of successes in Iraq by ISIL.
“After requests from airlines to use Iranian airspace because of the events in Iraq and Ukraine, we created five new air corridors,” said Ebrahim Shoushtari, deputy director for operations at the Iran Airports Company. “We now have 96 corridors.”
With large commercial jets charged about US$2,000 an overflight, Iran could be making as much as US$2 million (Dh7.3m) a day – $1m of which is at Iraq’s expense. The new route southward typically takes aircraft across the Black Sea from Romania to Turkey, crossing into Iranian airspace west of Lake Urmia.
From there, they track down the west side of the country, passing close to Khorramabad in the Zagros Mountains before flying out over the Gulf near Kish island.
Zoom out on the map on FlightRadar24 and the aircraft-packed route and its considerable detour are like the course of a mighty river seen from the air.
Equally apparent is the near-empty airspace over Iraq and Syria, conspicuous bald patches in the tapestry of modern air travel and a stark reminder that we live in dangerous times.
That was graphically underlined on Saturday with the loss of Russian Flight KGL9268, which crashed into the Sinai desert, killing all 224 on board.
It remains unclear what destroyed the Airbus 321, but whatever it was, some airlines are taking no chances.
Emirates, Etihad, Air France and Lufthansa were among those that reacted by rerouting flights over the Sinai or avoiding the peninsula altogether. Others were more sanguine. British Airways and easyJet announced they had no plans to alter their routes to and from Sharm El Sheikh.
Shortly after the crash, a group affiliated to ISIL claimed it had downed the Airbus 321, carrying Russian and Ukrainian holidaymakers home from the Egyptian resort of Sharm El Sheikh, “in response to Russian air strikes that killed hundreds of Muslims on Syrian land”.
On Monday, adding fuel to speculation of terrorism, Russian airline Metrojet blamed a “mechanical impact on the plane” for the loss of its aircraft. But it is thought that the militants were unlikely to possess the sort of sophisticated surface-to-air missiles required to hit an aircraft travelling at 12,000 metres. At best, ISIL might have access to Manpads, shoulder-fired Man Portable Air Defence Systems, such as the US Stinger.
Although the US state department believes hundreds of these might be at large in the region, they have a maximum vertical range less than a third as high as the aircraft was flying.
But the world of aviation was turned upside down in July last year when Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 on board, including 80 children.
Flight 17 was a wake-up call for the aviation industry, says Kaminsky-Morrow, and its spectre is governing airlines’ reactions to the still unexplained loss of KGL9268.
“After the events in Ukraine, the precautions that were put in place about not flying over conflict zones were extended to other regions of the world,” he said.
The crash of MH17 happened at the height of the conflict between the Ukraine government and pro-Russian rebels and, despite suspicions at the outset that this was no accidental air tragedy, the cause was initially unclear. But a report published last month by the Dutch Safety Board confirmed that the flight had been hit at 10,000 metres by a Russian-made warhead on a missile fired by a Russian-made Buk surface-to-air missile system. Who pulled the trigger has not been ascertained.
The damning evidence of a missile strike was irrefutable and macabre – the telltale bow-tie-shaped fragments from the warhead were a unique signature of the weapon embedded in the remains of the cockpit and the bodies of the crew.
The aviation industry, said the Dutch report, “should take more account of the changing world within which it operates”.
Conflicts involving groups other than governments were “more disorderly and less predictable than ‘traditional’ wars between states” and “the spread of advanced weapon systems means that the parties involved in these conflicts may possess these types of weapons and therefore are able to hit targets at greater distances and altitudes”.
The industry, it concluded, “should take urgent measures to identify, assess and manage the risk associated with flying over conflict zones more effectively”.
In fact, the aviation sector had already been jarred into action by the fate of MH17.
Immediately after the tragedy, the International Civil Aviation Organisation set up an early-warning information sharing system called the Conflict Zone Information Repository, which went live in April this year.
The problem, says Kaminsky-Morrow, is “that this kind of initiative is only as good as the information it receives and how willing people are to contribute information to it”.
Last month, the British Airline Pilots Association called for “accurate information about where it is safe to fly to be shared by nation states and operators worldwide”. Pilots wanted “clear direction from the UN on how safe routes are, particularly when close to or above conflict zones”.
The association was “encouraged” by the setting up of the information repository, but “not all countries are contributing data and using the information”.
Passengers and pilots, says Stephen Landells, a flight safety specialist at the pilots’ association, “want an open and uniform level of safety, not one that is decided in secret and in different ways by airlines and countries”.
There are 42 warnings in force on the CZIR, but these have been posted by only seven countries – France, Germany, the US, UK, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The UAE’s two bulletins, issued in July, prohibit all UAE-registered operators from flying in certain areas of Iraq and Yemen.
Examination of the 42 warnings reveals a startling fact – three of them show that airlines were expecting trouble over the Sinai, and had been warned not to fly below 7,900 metres in the region months ago.
Warnings about the danger of flying over certain parts of the Sinai were posted on March 30, September 8 and October 5 by the US, UK and Germany respectively.
The US warning, issued seven months ago and still in force, urges “extreme caution during flight operations” due to “the risk to safety from small-arms, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, anti-aircraft fire and shoulder-fired Manpads”.
The most recent notice, issued by Germany on October 5, advises all German operators not to fly below 7,900 metres, due to the “risk to aviation from dedicated anti-aviation weaponry”.
Egypt, noted the International Civil Aviation Organisation, had objected to this last warning.
In a letter to the organisation last month, Mahmoud El Zanaty, president of the Egyptian Civil Aviation Authority, said: “I have the honour to inform you that all necessary measures for safeguarding the airspace are already taken from our side.”
Whether or not that proves to have been the case remains to be determined by the investigation into the loss of Flight KGL9268.
newsdesk@thenational.ae