Ukraine airspace likely to be restricted until 2029, Eurocontrol says

Flights over Ukraine are likely to remain impossible until 2029, according to an announcement by the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation (Eurocontrol).

In their seven-year forecast for 2023-2029, Eurocontrol predicted that the redirected routes flown in the period of March 2022 – January 2023 will remain the same up to 2029 due to the ongoing military action, significant restrictions on flights in the airspace of Moldova, Russia and Belarus, as well as decreasing number of flights over Poland are expected, Euractiv reports.

The war has caused a lot of disruptions for civil aviation in the region, affecting some of the overflights and long-haul routes that were previously used to pass through Ukrainian airspace.

Ukraine closed the airspace to civil aircraft on 24 February 2022, when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. Soon after that, the United States and the European Union closed their airspace to the Russian and Belarusian airlines within the framework of the sanctions imposed for the invasion.

However, Eurocontrol’s numbers show that the restrictions affected traffic not only in the countries directly involved in the war, but also in all the neighbouring states. The number of flights decreased the most for Estonia (-52%) and Latvia (-51%), followed by Finland (-41%), Lithuania (-39%), Czech Republic (-38%), Poland (-37%) and Sweden (-35%).

Moreover, the overall domestic traffic flows are following a negative trend throughout all the European states.

Civil aviation which has already been eroded by the Covid years and the environmental pressures is now facing a new challenge of re-routing and the subsequent increasing ticket prices.

The energy supply disruptions, high energy prices and high inflation rates are also forecasted to affect travel demand for 2023-2024. Considering all the difficulties in the market, the 2019 number of flights (11.1 million) is expected to be reached no sooner than 2025.

The Baltic and Northern European states are said to be suffering mainly from the loss of the overflights from Asia. Most of the overflight routes have meanwhile moved to South-Eastern Europe, with the Balkan countries and Turkiye facing an unprecedented high growth of traffic in their airspace.

Ukraine's defiant

The prediction has sparked a lot of concern in the Ukrainian public space. Ukraine’s state-run air traffic enterprise (UkSATSE) disputed Eurocontrol, saying that Ukrainian airspace will reopen after the war ends.

“It is important to understand that Eurocontrol does not generate or use military forecasts, analytics, or assumptions to create its own forecasts. These calculations also do not include other factors of uncertainty, such as unforeseen economic turbulence, escalation of geopolitical tensions, or other unforeseen events that may have a negative impact on the development of aviation.

Despite the force majeure circumstances caused by the military aggression of the Russian Federation, Ukraine is fully preparing for the resumption of flights in its airspace,” UkSATSE stated.

The Eurocontrol noted that after the appearance of new objective factors, such as the end of the war and reformatting of the route network, the forecast will be updated using new data.

An expert from Avianews, Oleksandr Myronenko, explained that de-facto “it means Eurocontrol recommends the airlines not to count on or plan any future flights over Ukraine, but the situation can change at any moment”.

Several Ukrainian airlines, such as SkyUp and Supernova have expressed a desire to resume flights over Ukraine as soon as it becomes safe again, while Ryanair said that they are ready to come back to Ukraine a week after the airspace would be reopened.