On Thursday, 6 July we tracked the highest number of commercial flights ever, following more than 134,000. We posted the map below the following day to illustrate the busy skies and we received numerous questions about the blank areas on the map. Why are there big holes in places around the world?
Geopolitics
The most obvious “hole” in the Flightradar24 map of global air traffic at the moment is Ukraine. Following the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 in 2014, airlines began avoiding eastern Ukraine. When Russia began their full scale invasion in February 2022, all of Ukrainian airspace was closed to civil aviation.
The map above shows the entirety of Ukraine empty, but also the large buffer zone implemented by Russian authorities extending from the Ukrainian border.
Conflict avoidance
Civil aviation places safety above all else, meaning many of the most convenient international flight routes are avoided due to safety or security concerns. Often times it is not just a concern about overflying an area, but also “what happens if we need to divert here?”
For quite a few years now, flights have routed around Libya, but recent fighting in Sudan has expanded the area aircraft avoid, extending flight routes from Europe and northern Africa to destinations south of Sudan.
There are also areas around the world served by local airlines that are avoided by international carriers. Syria and Afghanistan still see regular commercial service, but those destinations are not served by large international airlines either due to governmental prohibition or the airlines’ own risk assessments.
Geography
The other main reason flights avoid a particular area is geography. Specifically, geography that makes the safe operation of commercial aviation difficult or near impossible. The most prominent example of this when looking at the Flightradar24 map is Tibet.
On the map above, blue pins represent airports while the white and yellow lines represent available airways that aircraft can use to transit an area. Nearly all of Tibet is airway-free, but not because the terrain is too high to fly over. Even the tallest mountains in the world just to the southwest are easily traversed, however, safety is again the prime consideration. Aircraft operating at a normal cruising altitude of 35-40,000 feet are flying through air that is less dense and contains less oxygen than air lower in the atmosphere.
At cruising altitude there is only about a minute of useful oxygen available before Hypoxia can begin affecting the brain. This is why airplanes are equipped with oxygen masks and why aircraft descend to 10,000 feet or lower in the event of a depressurization. The problem in Tibet is that much of the plateau is at or above 10,000 feet above mean sea level, making it impossible to descend to a safe altitude. Aircraft that do operate in this area follow special procedures and carry extra equipment to mitigate an emergency situation. For nearly all others, flying around is the easiest thing to do.
Remote geography meets busy trade routes
In eastern Russia the lack of flights is a combination of geopolitics and geography. There are few flights to begin with as there are not many cities in northern and eastern Russia that require large amounts of air service. But with the invasion of Ukraine came sanctions on Russia and prohibitions on aircraft from other countries operating in Russian airspace. This has resulted in even fewer flights over eastern Russian than at the beginning of 2022.
Much of the world’s air cargo transits Anchorage, Alaska in between Asia and North America and the fastest route between those two places travels directly through eastern Russia. Prior to the Ukrainian invasion, international airlines would fly from Anchorage to cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Seoul via Russian airspace. With the imposition of restrictions all of that traffic no longer uses Russia and instead routes out over the Pacific Ocean.
Flight planning is a balance of safety, security, and economics. Airlines will fly between two points as efficiently and as safely as they can. On some routes, that may mean taking a long detour to ensure the safety of their passengers.
