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Keith Tonkin has flown a Boeing 747 towards airspace where missiles were being fired, and knows the pressure pilots have been under this week.
“You’re stuck in that airplane until you land safely,” the veteran Australian pilot says.
Amid the expanding war in Iran – with missiles piercing the skies over the Middle East – pilots’ regimented routes have been thrown into chaos. They’ve been forced to turn planes around mid-flight or squeeze into narrowing air corridors, with hundreds of lives in their hands.
“They’ll be seeing more aeroplanes around them than they would have experienced in the past,” Tonkin says of the commercial pilots affected by conflict.
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“When the airspace is congested and you’ve got less room to manoeuvre. If something goes wrong, you have fewer options.”
Airspace was closed on Saturday, after the US and Israel launched airstrikes and Iran retaliated with a barrages of missiles across the Middle East.
Airborne planes diverted to the nearest airports available.
The mass disruption was a stark difference to the one-off disruptions pilots usually face, says Tonkin, a former Qantas captain.
He says that in the early 2000s India once fired missiles in his flight path as he piloted his regular Boeing 747 route from Rome to Singapore. Air traffic controllers warned Tonkin that live missile drills had unexpectedly closed the airspace around the Bay of Bengal, forcing him to recalculate.
“The first thing is: Where are we? And how much fuel have we got and where do we need to go?” he says.
Tonkin and his first officer, or co-pilot, checked their maps for a nearby airport to land at. With enough fuel reserves, they decided to keep going – the long way around.
These calculations would normally be made with computer readouts and airline operations centre on speed dial, Tonkin says. But crises that erupt without warning can leave pilots to rely on their own judgment.
Diversion dilemmas
Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and neighbours closed all or part of their airspace on Saturday. Emirates, Qatar and Etihad airlines all rushed to ground flights, filling up airport space.
The vice-president of the Australian and International Pilots Association, Steve Cornell, says colleagues told him that some airliners flying with low fuel were forced to land even when their calls to air traffic controllers were not being acknowledged.
“Their only option was to land, whether they were going to be cleared to do so or not,” he says.
“The closer you get to Dubai, Doha or Abu Dhabi, the [fewer] options you’ve got when all those airports close.”
Other pilots heading to the region, but who were further away from the conflict, could take time to plan to turn back, Cornell says.
In one case, an Emirates flight from Auckland was eight hours into its journey when news broke of the US strikes in Iran on Saturday night – it returned to New Zealand. Stopping and waiting in Singapore or Australia would have offered little benefit as Dubai’s airport remained closed for days.
Diversions can also create other problems, Cornell says. Planes arriving unexpectedly may find airports are already busy, delaying their refuelling and departure.
Passengers can also be stuck on planes, or forced to handle unfamiliar border and immigration systems.
Airlines develop contingency plans for conflicts and can advise crews over satellite phone, while many planes even have alternate routes pre-programmed into their navigation systems, according to aviation experts.
It’s the captains, though, that have ultimate responsibility and they have faced extreme pressure this week, Cornell says.
“Information was fairly scarce to come by, so they were operating under a fairly high level of uncertainty, which is stressful for anyone,” he says.
Calm teamwork between captain and first officer is key, according to Christopher Docherty, who had a bullet puncture his seat while serving as first officer on a flight to Haiti.
Docherty and captain Juan Zuluaga were just 500 feet in the air approaching Haiti’s Port-au-Prince in 2024 when their plane was shot six times, injuring a flight attendant and damaging key systems, including crucial fuel level indicators.
The duo rerouted to Santiago, 300 km away, with later analysis finding they had made the right choices, Docherty told a recognition event in December.
“The fact that we had two pilots in this cockpit on this day was why this flight was successful,” he says.
Finding a path to safety
Once pilots take a new course they must tell air traffic controllers.
Dr Tony Stanton, consultant director of Strategic Air, says controllers’ jobs became much harder over the past week, as they struggle to slot planes into overstuffed air routes while keeping them far enough apart.
Air traffic maps show planes squeezed into key paths to get around Iran – one over Turkey to the north, and one over Egypt and Oman to the south. Those highways of the sky are now “very congested,” Stanton says, creating delays worldwide.
Stanton says pilots also need to advise the cabin crew and consider telling passengers about military actions near planned flight paths, if safe to do so.
“You don’t want to scare the crap out of people,” he says. “You’ve got to ask yourself: do people need to know? Will it just scare people when they can’t do anything about it anyway?”
It can be more straightforward to tell people upfront, as one American Airlines captain did after turning back towards Philadelphia to avoid the US strikes. A passenger, Aaqil Mujiburrahman, said the flight to Doha was seven hours in when the captain’s voice sounded over the intercom.
“The captain made an announcement, it’s like: ‘war has begun, so the airspaces have been closed and we need to head back,’” he told ABC News in the US.
Pilots are focused on passenger comfort and face regular training and testing to ensure they’re up to the task, Stanton says, with all airlines providing strong support to their teams in the air today.
“If you’re flying with the major airline, you could rest assured that there’s a whole lot of work that’s been done in the background to ensure the safety of that flight,” he says.
