As tensions rise in the Middle East, more planes flew over Afghanistan last week

Over the past week, more flights have been rerouted over Afghanistan to avoid Iranian airspace, according to data. This has made travel times and fuel costs longer and is the latest problem for routes between Asia and Europe as tensions rise in the Middle East.

Flights over Afghanistan have been going up for a while now, but data from flight tracker FlightRadar24 shows that this trend has been sped up even more by people expecting Israel to respond to Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Israel last week.

Last week, EASA told planes to stay away from Iranian airspace.
On September 29, FlightRadar24 showed that 132 planes flew over Afghanistan. As of Oct. 2, 176 planes flew over Afghanistan. That was the day after Iran attacked Israel.

After slowly going up, the daily number reached 222 on October 6.
In recent days, Taliban leaders said there were even more overflights than what FlightRadar24 showed.

The spokesman for the Ministry of Transportation and Aviation, which is run by the Taliban, said, “Specifically, over the last five or six days, there have been about 350 transit flights in 24 hours, compared to about 100 transit flights a year ago.”

Tuesday, FlightRadar24 showed that Singapore Airlines (SIAL.SI) and British Airways (ICAG.L) were using Afghanistan’s airspace.

Not a single flight was shown to have used Afghan airspace more in the last week in the data. Reuters asked British Airways and Singapore Airlines for comments, but neither company responded right away.

When the war in Ukraine started in 2022, most Western airlines were not allowed to fly over Russia or Ukraine. As a result, many airlines started flying through Iran and the Middle East.

The new route shows how hard it is for airlines to decide what to do as fears of a regional war rise a year after the Israel-Hamas war began and flight safety across the Middle East becomes less stable.

Mark Zee, founder of the flight-risk information sharing group OPSGROUP, said, “What was already a very limited set of route options is now down to the last few choices that there are.” This is why there is more traffic in Afghanistan.

Since the Taliban took over three years ago, planes that fly over Afghanistan have not had access to air traffic control. Instead, they have had to rely on rules from regulators.

“I expect that this avoidance of Iran, and possibly Iraq, will continue for several weeks at least, until either Israel makes a move, or the situation calms,” he said.