A FedEx jet left Paris for Dubai on Feb. 26. It landed 6 hours 37 minutes later. The same flight on Oct. 11 took 11 hours 44 minutes. Nothing changed about the plane. The sky changed.
The Journal's Benjamin Katz, Daniel Kiss and Jason French mapped four routes that used to be routine. Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have pushed airlines off big stretches of sky between Europe and Asia. In the past month, strikes on Saudi airports knocked out one of the few paths British Airways and FedEx still had, by Flightradar24's tracking. FedEx now flies its Paris to Dubai run closer to China, to spend less time over Afghanistan and Pakistan. That detour adds five hours.
Qantas gave up its Perth to London nonstop in March. It had flown since 2018 as one of the longest flights in the world. The plane now stops in Singapore for fuel, which adds about four hours. A 17-hour trip took 21 hours 30 minutes on Oct. 11. British Airways moved its Mumbai to London flight over Central Asia instead. The clock didn't change much, but the new path has its own worries, including Afghanistan with no active air-traffic control. Air India, banned from Pakistan's skies, now routes London to Delhi near Damascus. Some regulators call parts of that stretch unsafe. Emirates, Qatar Airways and Turkish Airlines fly it too.
Who decides where a plane flies
Mostly the airline. Outside a full closure, carriers pick their own routes from a patchwork of advisories. Mark Zee, a former pilot who founded the advisory group OpsGroup, says airlines have stopped asking which route is fully safe. They ask which one carries the least risk. And, in his words, “least risk is not low risk.” His group, with about 10,000 members, said last week that Saudi airspace wasn't safe at any altitude.
Our read
Cash Flow, M5, with a travel-insurance note for M11. A longer flight burns more fuel and keeps a crew and a plane busy for more hours. Costs like that tend to find their way into fares and air-freight prices over time. For a traveler, a detour of four or five hours also makes a missed connection more likely. A route sold as nonstop last year can come with a fuel stop this year.
Here's the one check for this week if you've got a long trip booked, or a big trip on the retirement wish list. Pull up the booking and look at the routing, the stops and the plane. Then read what your travel insurance actually covers. Many policies leave out delays and cancellations tied to war or unrest, and that's what is rerouting these flights. If the exclusion is there, you want to know before you're stuck in Singapore in the middle of the night. If travel is a big line in your retirement budget, bring the itinerary and the policy to your next review.