How Safe Is It to Fly Around Conflict Zones?
Due to the war in Ukraine, flights between Europe and China can no longer take the short route through Russia. Instead, they are diverted to safer corridors over a Middle East, corridors which are also surrounded by conflicts. Past that area, the Pakistan-India border remains, now calm, but no stranger to surprises.
How safe is it to fly over these areas? Let's start from the basics.
Flight Information Regions (FIRs)
When you are on a flight, air traffic controllers are constantly checking your trajectory and communicating with pilots if they consider that re-routing is necessary. If your flight is very long, they will not track it from beginning to end. Once it crosses the boundary of the flight region assigned to them, they will hand it over to the controllers of the new region. These regions, Flight Information Regions (FIRs), ensure that air traffic controllers only work for the airspace which they have the most available information and expertise.
FIRs do not define the sovereign airspace of a country, but they overlap significantly. For example, while most European countries have FIRs exactly following their land boundaries, the Shanwick FIR in the North Atlantic is managed by Ireland and the United Kingdom, even if it far away from their sovereignty boundaries. The countries assigned to different FIRs are defined by ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization.
When we hear that an airspace has been closed, it means that the controllers in a specific FIR have issued a NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions), stating that no more flights are allowed to enter into it. Of course, it's not air traffic controllers alone that make this decision, as it's often influenced by other authorities from the country. NOTAMs are legally binding. This applies even if a country is not sovereign of the airspace, as long as ICAO has given it the mandate to regulate it.
On many occasions, controllers only need to close a small portion of the airspace, something which is routinely done in many countries to protect government buildings, military areas, etc. In the United States, the airspace above the Pentagon, White House and Area 51 are always restricted.
Ukraine and the Middle East
When a conflict starts, the governments involved act quickly to close their airspace. This is what Ukraine did on February 2th, 2024, right after the Russia invasion began. Russia also closed their airspace to Western airlines on February 28th, claiming it to be a retaliatory measure against the sanctions imposed to them.
But when the risks are high, airlines might not even wait for a NOTAM to be issued. Dutch airline KLM suspended all their flights to Kiev nine days before the invasion began, and Lufthansa did the same three days before the invasion. This highlights the safety culture impregnated in the aviation industry.
The recent escalation between Iran and the United States has added a lot of uncertainty to some of the busiest connecting routes in the world: those passing over Dubai, Qatar and Abu Dhabi. The uncertainty comes from the fact that Iran can retaliate US strikes by attacking one of their military bases in the Middle East, and there are over 20 of them. Should all areas between Iran and a US bases be closed? Given the large number of bases, this seems unfeasible.
However, the good news is that it's in nobody's interest to have a commercial flight shot down. That flight might be carrying your own nationals, or foreigners from a nation currently not involved in the conflict, but that that might get very upset after seeing such tragedy.
An example of the strive to prevent such tragedies is from June 23rd, 2025, when the Iranian government informed Qatar five hours before attacking the Al Udeid US military base. This gave them plenty of time to issue a NOTAM closing their airspace, preventing any accident. The reasons behind this notification were not exclusively related to aviation safety, it was strategic in many other levels, but the aviation safety concern was surely one of them.
But are ballistic missiles a big threat to aviation? What are actually the most dangerous flying military objects? Let's take a look at the different types.
Drones
Drones come in many different sizes. The small ones, the ones that fit in your hand and have four battery-driver propellers (quadcopters), can only reach heights of about 10,000 ft (3,000 m). Due to this, they only represent a hazard for planes taking off or landing, something rare around conflict zones since most commercial airports would be closed.
Larger drones usually run on fuel instead of batteries, allowing them to fly for much longer distances. These can reach cruising altitudes, or even go higher like the MQ-9 Reaper from the United States, which goes up to 50,000 ft. Despite this overlap in altitude, drones are very unlikely to hit a commercial plane. This is because the routing of such drones is done by military air traffic controllers, who have access to real-time information on commercial flights and can instantly change the course of the drone to maintain separation from other aircraft if deemed necessary. Large drones are about 2-3 times slower than commercial planes, allowing for larger time margins to avoid collision.
There has not been a single accident where a large drone collided with a plane. Smaller drones are actually more dangerous. Not because of military operations, but because drone enthusiasts sometimes decided to spend the weekend flying them close to an airport. Fortunately, there have not yet been any fatalities due to this, only near misses, hundreds of them, according to the FAA.
Listing a couple of examples, out of many:
- May 2021. A drone flew near the aircraft's wing when the aircraft was taking off at Helsinki airport.
- November 2024: Pilots reported that a drone passed 300 ft (90 m) far from them during their final approach.
Ballistic missiles
Ballistic missiles are similar to cannon balls: once fired toward a specific target, there is little you can do to correct its trajectory. Modern ballistic missiles allow for small corrections in trajectory to improve the targeting accuracy, but it’s very very limited compared to drones (they cannot be steered back).
The trajectory followed by such missiles is parabolic, where the missile first exists and the atmosphere and then re-enters. Like the long range drones, such altitude span interferes with the cruising altitude of the planes, but the likelihood of hitting one is even lower than drones.
Missiles can cover huge distances in just a few minutes, compared to the hours needed by the slower drones. Moreover, their parabolic trajectory reaching outside the atmosphere makes them spend very little time at aircraft altitudes, compared to the sustained low-altitude flying of drones. They are also smaller in size, with just 2-3 meters in diameter compared to the 20 m wingspan of the MQ9 drone. All of these factors make ballistic missiles extremely unlikely to hit a plane, and it has never happened either.
Hypersonic missiles
Hypersonic missiles are those that can travel five times faster than the speed of sound (Mach 5). These are no longer “dumb” cannon balls. They are powered by an engine, have tiny wings, and fly straight after launch, rather than in a parabolic arc.
The good news is that the height at which they fly is much higher than the cruising altitudes of commercial airlines: typically 65,000 ft (20,000 m) or higher, whereas planes only reach up to 45,000 ft (13,000 m). Therefore, even if they do not completely exit the atmosphere, they remain well above planes.
One potentially dangerous phase of hypersonic missiles is that, upon descending to hit their target, they usually perform a series of unpredictable and complex maneuvers aimed at evading iron-dome type defenses. If the area under attack is still holding commercial flights, these sudden changes in trajectory could pose a big risk, especially around an airport.
Fortunately, there are also no accidents in commercial aviation due to hypersonic missiles. Like for the ballistic ones, these launches are carefully planned, with commercial aviation safety in mind.
Surface-to-Air missiles
The real threat to commercial aviation are Surface to Air Missiles (SAMs). As the name implies, these missiles are made for shutting down enemy aircraft. SAMs are fired from base stations that are constantly scanning the air to determine if the detected aircraft are “friends”, “foes”, or of “unknown” origin. To do this, the base station sends an interrogating beam to the transponder of the plane, and if the response is a military-encrypted message that cannot be decoded with the key that the base station has (the key of your friends), then it's labeled as “foe”. Most SAM bases are designed to fire automatically if “foe” is detected.
The transponders from commercial planes always respond with standard formats like Mode A, C or S, all of which never use encryption. Any SAM receiving these signals back will label the aircraft as “friend” and not fire. However, SAMs can also be manually operated. During a conflict, an operator might just have a few seconds to review the output from the base station and decide on whether or not to press the firing button. There is no going back after pressing. The missiles are guided by radar and infrared, and will steer themselves towards the aircraft identified as “foe”.
Unfortunately, there are several precedents of SAMs hitting commercial planes:
- July 1988: Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down by a US SAM fired from battleship USS Vincennes during the Iran-Iraq war, when the battleship was under attack and wrongly identified the plane as a fighter jet.
- October 2021: Sibir Airlines Flight 1812 was shot down by a Ukrainian SAM over the Black Sea during a military exercise.
- July 2014: Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by a Russian SAM during the Donbas war in Ukraine.
- December 2024: Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243 was shot down by a Russian SAM which at that time was engaged in repelling a drone attack sent by the Ukrainian army.
To make things worse, military aircraft can also broadcast their position in the same unencrypted format as commercial flights, to try to trick the SAM base station that they are not a threat. There are no concrete examples of such actions in the public domain. However, there are examples of military planes turning off their transponder (something not permitted by ICAO either), something which could also happen to a commercial aircraft if its transponder breaks.
Conclusion
Aviation accidents due to collision with military weapons are extremely rare. Despite the precedents with SAMs, the accident rate remains extremely low, given how many millions of flights have operated around conflict zones in the past decades.
Again, even during a war, it's in nobody's interest to shut down a commercial flight. Both sides will always plan their activities with this precaution in mind.