The war games in Taiwan have highlighted an aviation safety problem: when there is an international crisis, civilian aircraft continue to fly even where missiles are fired, until the situation becomes absolutely impossible; and this, at the moment, does not only concern Taiwan and the South China Sea, but also the overall safety of flights between Europe and Asia.
To realize this, just look at the two geographical maps that we publish in this article. The first, at the beginning, shows how busy civilian flights continue to be in the Taiwan-China area, at any date X and time Y; specifically, the map shows the number and position of airliners flying around Taiwan on August 6 at 9.10 am despite the war games that were already underway. Even in the presence of serious risks for travelers, there seems to be extreme reluctance, both on the part of states and on the part of airlines, to give up flights.
If the first map highlights a local problem, the second map indicates that ALL flights between Europe and the Far East fly over countries classified as at risk by the EU, whether it is a red (i.e. extreme), orange or yellow risk. like the one attributed to Turkey, where the passages are more dense.
We all tend to imagine that there is a supranational authority (one could think of IATA or ICAO) that watches as a global demiurge over aviation safety, and that can say yes or no to overflight, and that can preclude (for example) the airspace of a dangerous country, or of a specific area of that country (such as Kurdistan); and instead no external and superior authority can impose such a decision, not even (to give an extreme example) on the airspace of Ukraine in full-blown war (as demonstrated by the cases of two civilian aircraft shot down over Ukraine, on July 17, 2014 and 8 January 2020); only interested states can do so. Maybe a company makes customers fly to a risk area, which other companies avoid flying over, and in the table comparison between times and prices it turns out that the flight of that company is shorter and costs less, and therefore is more attractive. As for the States, which are the only ones entitled to close their respective airspace, they do so rarely and unwillingly, in order not to appear insecure, and also not to lose the revenue from overflight rights. In short, there is no need to panic, but it is a fact that there is no global demiurge who watches over our air safety.
The professor. Antonio Bordoni, one of the massini Italian aviation safety experts, cites a recent study (Dutch Safety Board, Safe Flight Routes. Responses to escalating conflicts, 2021 report): this analysis “highlighted that most of the States with an ongoing conflict on their territory, or nearby, do not close or limit their airspace and, due to extreme gravity, do not even share information on the ongoing conflict “.
Fortunately, observes Bordoni, “there are some countries that play a fundamental role in the dissemination of information. The United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and France, for example, not only inform all airlines flying their state flag about the threats arising from conflict zones, but also offer advice and recommendations, the scope of which is not it is limited to the airlines of its own state. Even the airlines of other nations can benefit from the recommendations and prohibitions of these individual countries by conforming ”.
An intervention at European level could not be missing on the subject. Risk assessments and conflict zone advice are published at EASA, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency. It is precisely EASA that has produced the above map, which highlights the risk of flights between Europe and the Far East. However, Bordoni points out that “airlines hardly decide to cancel a route”, for obvious economic reasons.