25 airports and 400+ flights are out of bounds for now

medium120976493In the volatile border belt with Pakistan, India has shut down airports for commercial flights. For now, 25 of them across northern, western and central India. “There is no information yet on how long these airports will remain shut to civilian flights. We expect them to reopen at 5.30 am on May 10,” an airline official said. These 25 airports had handled a traffic of 16 lakh passengers in March this year, data from the Airports Authority of India showed. After the sudden closure, multiple airlines cancelled a combined 430 flights for Thursday (May 8) — about 3% of India’s scheduled flights. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}))}(); The domino effect had begun early on Wednesday (May 7) morning, after India’s Operation Sindoor against terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and PoK. As airlines cancelled departures and arrivals from airports that were shut, they re-routed flights — changing schedules and affecting flights at other airports as well. About 250 flights ended up being cancelled.Airlines alerted their passengers to the airport closures, changes in routes, and possible delays. Their advisories asked people scheduled to travel on Thursday and Friday to stay updated on their flight status and confirm schedules before heading to the airport. IndiGo announced it had cancelled its flights until 5.30am on May 10 to and from Srinagar, Jammu, Amritsar, Leh, Chandigarh, Dharamsala, Bikaner, Jodhpur, Gwalior, Kishangarh and Rajkot.Air India cancelled flights operating until 5.29am on May 10 to and from Jammu, Srinagar, Leh, Jodhpur, Amritsar, Bhuj, Jamnagar, Chandigarh, and Rajkot. Air India Express said it cancelled flights to and from Amritsar, Gwalior, Jammu, Srinagar, and Hindon until 5.30 am on May 10. The airline offered a full refund or free rescheduling option.SpiceJet announced the suspension of flights to/from Dharamsala, Leh, Jammu, Srinagar, and Amritsar until further notice. SpiceJet also offered a full refund or free reschedule. AkasaAir announced that its flights to and from Srinagar scheduled until May 9 are cancelled. The airline said it would offer a full refund for the cancelled flights or a free reschedule to any date within seven days of the original departure date.Weddings, family reunion, homecoming: Many plans were upsetIt was meant to be a routine trip. But the timing was bad. “We waited in the aircraft for over two hours. We were then made to deboard as our flight was cancelled. The airlines provided us with hotel accommodation and meals, but I want to return to New York soon,” said Chandru Advani, who had boarded a Delhi-New York flight with his 86-year-old mother around midnight on Wednesday.Miles away at Baku, Azerbaijan, an Indian family was stuck because their flight to Mumbai was delayed, finally took off after two hours, but had to fly back to Baku because it couldn’t go over the Pakistani airspace — Operation Sindoor was on, they would find out later. “After nearly seven hours in flight, we went back to Aliyev (Baku) airport,” Aloysius D’Silva, who was travelling with five other family members, said. Eventually, they booked tickets through Qatar to Bengaluru, and then to Mangaluru, their hometown.So, given how chaotic Wednesday turned out to be, people are already being cautious about their plans. “My family advised against going to Delhi and then travelling to Chandigarh,” Pune-based Shruti Pandey said. So, she cancelled the trip she had planned for Thursday. Some had already been informed that their flights have been cancelled. “I will take a flight to Varanasi from Delhi, maybe on another date,” said Abhishek Jha, who was supposed to fly out from Hindon. And others are playing it by the ear. “The Udaipur airport has not been closed yet. I haven’t got any message from the airline. So, I’ll go on my trip if I don’t get a message,” said Sanjay Badge in Pune, set to go to Udaipur for a wedding.But a lot of things can be simply beyond control. “A client from a holiday in Leh with his family wants to come back immediately. But with the Leh airport closed, we are thinking about alternatives for their return,” said Nilesh Bhansali, who runs a travel services company in Pune. So travel services are asking people to use their judgment. “Right now, travellers should reconsider non-essential travel to certain domestic regions like Kashmir, parts of Jammu, Leh and Amritsar. These areas are often the first to experience disruptions, both operational and security-related, when tensions escalate,” said Karan Agarwal, the director of Cox & Kings. “It is not about cancelling plans out of fear, but about timing them with intelligence and awareness.”But the Pakistan airspace is a lot more convoluted nowPakistan’s airlines have cancelled 147 flights, which accounts for 17% of its total scheduled flights for Thursday. But late into Wednesday night, Pakistan kept wavering on what it’s doing with its airspace.Dawn reported that Pakistan’s Civil Aviation Authority had restored air traffic across major routes — over Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Karachi — on May 7, hours after saying that Pakistan’s airspace was closed off to all airlines for 48 hours. The Lahore flight region will be closed at all altitudes until 12.20pm on May 9, it added.When Pakistan’s air space closes, it steps up the pressure on air traffic control in Ahmedabad and Mumbai — the two routes to which most air traffic is diverted. “It happened in 1971 (Indo-Pak War), 1999 (Kargil conflict), 2001-02 (after the Parliament attack), 2019 (after the Balakot strike) and now after the Pahalgam attack,” a retired air traffic controller said. This time, Mumbai has been handling about 130 re-routed flights every day and Ahmedabad handles about 80 re-routed flights (passing most of them over to Mumbai).But the pressure could go up. The Dutch airline KLM said it was not flying over Pakistan “until further notice”. Singapore Airlines said it had stopped flying over Pakistan since May 6. Korean Air has begun to re-route its flights to Dubai, taking a Myanmar-Bangladesh-India route instead. Thai Airways is re-routing its flights as well, Reuters reported.Usually, these zones that flights avoid are easy to spot — like in the map we used above. And the re-routing drives up flight times, the precedent for not declaring a closed airspace is far too grim.In 2014, a Malaysia Airlines flight with 300 people on board was “misidentified” as a target and shot down over eastern Ukraine. The airspace over eastern Ukraine was “heavily travelled” on the day of the crash — 160 commercial airliners flew over the region — even though Ukraine and Russia were engaged in a conflict. And in 2021, Iran shot down a Ukrainian flight after its air defence unit “misidentified” it.(With inputs from Pune, Delhi, Ghaziabad, Mangaluru, and agencies)