Actually, “high seas” by definition are international waters. In territorial waters, the same concept applies, though.
Don’t airlines also have to pay transit fees? I seem to recall reading that a few years back Laos’ single largest source of foreign revenue was airlines paying to fly over it.
Yep. My dad used to fly 747s in the 80s he said they always had to check in when crossing Laos, but that their (the Lao) equipment was ancient and it was like flying into a black hole. For a poor country, all the flights to Bangkok could well be a primary income earner.
Yes, and not only that, but I recently read an article in which it said that United Airlines had updated their route planning software to take that into consideration. In other words, when planning a route from San Francisco to London, the route was planned to take the lowest cost taking into account the old factors of fuel and weather as well as the new factor of the fee to Canada, which is proportional to the length of the of flight path over Canada.
This results in a balancing act: Flying over Canada more generally results in a shorter flight, leading to lower fuel costs, but higher fees to Canada.
Of course, now that fuel has gotten more expensive, the balance is shifting back to the shorter path, more over Canada. But the point is until just a few years ago, the Canada fee wasn’t even considered.
Ed
Huh? Unless you had some intermediate stop, I think you’d be over Soviet airspace for a lot more than 20 minutes at that time. Map of the Great Circle route from Bangkok to Frankfurt:
Great circles are the best way to shorten your ground distance, but I think considerations of jet streams, wather, traffic routing, transit fees and politics lead flights to depart from them fairly often. See suranyi’s post.
Just some more anecdotal info:
US flagged-airliners can fly over/through Cuban airspace - they just get a bill from the Cubans for it. They do the same cost/benefit analysis that suranyi referred to concerning Canada. I have had to overfly Cuba (unplanned) because we were avoiding weather, and the Cubans simply noted our flight number, when and where we checked in and where we left. Money changes hands and everyone is happy.
For military aircraft it is a completely different story. Even flying my trusty C-141 around the world required diplomatic clearances from every country. Most close US allies (the UK, Germany, Japan, Korea) would issue “blanket” diplomatic clearances for each year. They would have one for cargo aircraft, one for fighters, one for tankers, etc. Just put that on the flight plan and you were good to go.
For other countries it got MUCH more specific, but this thread is about commercial flights so I’ll stop.
4 engine turboprop- not exactly a jet.