If South Korean airliners regularly have to bypass North Korea on their way to North America (the shortest route from Seoul to San Francisco, for instance, involves flying over the North,) does that add up to significant fuel expenses for air carriers servicing South Korean airports?
What do you mean “if”? There’s no way a South Korean airliner is going to fly over North Korea. That would be a guarantee of getting shot down, or at least shot at.
They avoid Russian airspace as well.
I don’t think any civilian airliners from any country overfly North Korea.
That’s not true. I’ve flown several times between Chicago and Seoul-Incheon, on a South Korean airline, and the route goes through Canada, north of Alaska, over eastern Siberia and China, and finally diverts to the west of North Korea.
According to the link in post #2, Lufthansa, Air France and KLM all overfly North Korea.
Yep, I’ve flown London to Tokyo over the north pole on ANA and flown across a big chunk of Siberia.
Link in post #2 corroborates what I’ve seen flying on ROK airlines, on the little GPS display things when you fly: ROK airliners dog leg around NK. They don’t avoid Russia. That might be someone recalling two incidents during the Cold War when ROK airliners were shot or forced down after entering Soviet air space they were ostensibly trying to avoid (the well known 1987 case, but there was an earlier one where an ROK 707 was forced to land on a frozen lake in Siberia).
I was interested to read in that link that not every airline avoids NK airspace. I find that somewhat unsettling, in the same vein as the revelation at the time of the downing of the Malaysian airliner over Ukraine that various airlines were not avoiding that and a number of other conflict zones unless there was first a demonstrated specific threat.
It helps that there aren’t that many populous destinations on “the other side” of North Korea from South Korea. You can generate an azimuthal-projection map centered at any point on the globe using this page. If you do this, you see that travelling due north from Seoul along a great circle takes you over Manchuria, Eastern Siberia, Greenland, and eventually the Amazon rainforest. None of these locations are terribly densely populated.
Even avoiding a wedge of 15° east or west of due north doesn’t cost you all that much in terms of likely destinations. The initial compass bearing that takes you from Seoul to New York is a little greater than 15°, and you can reach every European destination along a great circle route by starting with a bearing more than 20° from due north.
To be fair, they do avoid flying over the North South border, Pyongyang area…
Any that fly over North Korean land seem to fly over the far north coast up near china,
east of 129 degrees, eg where the city of Chongjin is. Its a very thin strip and its probably in Chinese ATC control, or at least you can ask Chinese ATC about the situation at the moment ? its very dense with chinese planes so safety in numbers… NK isn’t going to go postal on CHINA ??? China ATC would know if there was some sort of military testing ??? they’d have cancelled hundreds of flights in the first day … and send down a militiary attache… attached to an airforce and navy … saying "whats up then ?.. Some sort of mistake, we assume ??? "
US airlines can fly over NK airspace over the water east of 132 degrees,
but probably avoid the specific rectangle that is east of 135 degrees because NK insists on dropping missiles into that area - they notified that its their target… I guess NK do this for annoyance value… because they know its safer for the airliners to go to the south or north of the Sea of Japan (aka East China Sea ? Well in chinese, East Sea… ) . The longer distance flights aren’t particularly worried about the dimension of the Sea of Japan, in terms of safety, because they need to make efficient progress toward their destination… So the european airlines fly direct over the Sea of Japan, even though its NK airspace and a bit over that Chongjin coast ?
I notice that Turkey’s airlines fly TO Russia still, and I can’t think of any other enemy of Russia that would be avoiding Russia. USA airlines ,15 planes Over siberea at the moment. Arabia’s airlines fly a great circle Arabia to USA via the north… Leave Dubai or something, first going up over Iran and the following the Ukraine-Russia Border… up over the Baltic and North seas to Iceland… and great curving back down to JFK,etc. They don’t avoid Russia. Its a sensible way to go given that they don’t want to touch down in Europe.
Does North Korea allow commercial air traffic over its territory?
Flights I’m on always dogleg around North Korea, but they don’t have problems with Russia. Usually those are Chinese or American airlines, though, and not Korean.
If you look at live flights Flightradar24: Live Flight Tracker - Real-Time Flight Tracker Map you will see that most, if not all airlines avoid NK.