Given that Israel is located in the general neighbourhood of countries which don’t recognize its existence, or are even openly hostile to it, how does this situation affect commercial air traffic in the area?
Presumably flying over another country’s airspace requires permission and communication with the ground control. Does that mean that Israeli passenger aircraft can’t fly over many of these nearby countries? For instance, what do the El Al flight paths to India look like? Do they make a big circle over the south of the Arabian peninsula to avoid Saudi Arabia and Yemen? Do they make a big circle over the north of it, and also avoid Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan?
Conversely, do commercial flights of all the countries which are unfriendly or hostile to Israel avoid Israeli airspace, or do they just plough through it with impunity? Normally this would be less of an issue for flights from the Arabian peninsula to Europe, since Israel is small enough that it’s easy to avoid. However, with the recent civil war in Syria I’d imagine a lot of commercial aircraft would be avoiding flying over it, which might make crossing Israel the next-shortest route.
It gets very complicated., I’ve been on flights in which they announce that the in-flight movie would not start for another hour, because of the airline’s rights to show a certain movie in a certain country’s air space.
US airlines sometimes fly in Cuban air-space, but Cuba charges certain countries a “toll” to fly through, and if the airline is unwilling to pay Cuba the fee, they have to fly around.
Most major international airlines are signatory to IATA, which is a treaty that regulates all of these things. Some airlines are non-IATA, and have no landing rights in countries whose airports are IATA. For example, when I lived in Jordan, people would frequently fly from Damascus to Eastern Europe airports like Budapest or East Berllin on Malev or Inerflug, because they were non-IATA airlines flying to non-IATA airports, with cut-rate fares that were not suibject to IATA fare-sharing agreements. The airport and the airline in Jordan were IATA, so had direct but more expensive flights to places like London and Paris.
IATA’s Wiki page appears to have been meticulously and surgically pared down to irrelevant in-house tripe, so it is hard to find any information on line describing how IATA actually works. and what I’ve described above is from memory. Hopefully, someone here is more knowledgeable. IATA has announced that the Malaysian jet was in “unrestricted” air-space when shot down over Ukraine, and the habitually stenographic news media can hardly be expected to sort out and explain what that means. Apparently, on an ad-hoc basis, IATA designates certain airspace as “restricted”, probably for a number of long- and short-term reasons.
Israeli airlines do not generally fly over Arabia.
LY75 flies over Turkey , Kazakhstan , China … to Hong Kong … I see one on the flightradar24 showing it has just lifted off and headed off due North to Turkey.
They do fly to Egypt but there is a reason Arabia is not big on their list of destinations.