Name: The Most Valuable Airspace in the World
Uploaded: 2021-05-30T03:47:45.000Z
Duration: 10 min 48 s
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基礎受動態

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This is East Asia—comprised of China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan—and this is Europe.

2.4 billion people live in these two areas—a third of the world's population.

More impressively, each of these two regions have a GDP of about $20 trillion.

Combined, just these countries account for half of the world's economic activity.

They are two of the world's most dense, most developed, and m ost economically interlinked

regions and are home to the world's largest and most influential cities yet laying between

This more of less means that one country controls whether Europe can get to Asia and vice versa

During the cold war, almost universally, non-soviet airlines were not allowed to fly over the

In the 1950's, flying on BOAC, which later became British Airways, the fastest route

from London to Tokyo involved leaving London at 10am on Friday and stopping in Rome, Beirut,

Bahrain, Karachi, Calcutta, Yangon, Bangkok, and Manila before finally arriving in Tokyo

All in all, that was 36 hours and 10,000 miles of travel to get between two cities 6,000

miles apart and that was also their fastest service on the Comet jet plane.

Their slower and cheaper propeller plane service would leave London on a Sunday and not arrive

in Tokyo until Thursday after 88 hours of travel.

It was just hugely inefficient but there was a better way—over the Arctic.

SAS was the first to develop routes overflying the Arctic but other airlines soon followed.

These routes were first used to get to the American west coast faster.

This involved developing new navigation systems to overcome the issue of traditional magnetic

compasses not working properly in the high north.

In the 1950's no commercial airplane had the range to fly to the American west coast

non-stop but with SAS's new polar route they would take a relatively quick route from

Copenhagen stopping in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland and Winnipeg, Canada before arriving in Los

This cut what was previously a 36 hour trip down to 22.

With SAS having proven that commercial flights over the Arctic were both safe and commercially

viable, other airlines quickly followed not only setting up routes to the American west

The most direct route from London to Tokyo flies over Siberia, but since that airspace

was closed airlines chose another way—the other way around the world.

In 1960, only 40,000 people lived in Anchorage, Alaska and Alaska had just became a state

the year before, but its airport emerged as a crucial stopping point between Europe and

BOAC's thrice weekly polar route from London to Tokyo would leave Heathrow at 1:45 pm,

arrive in Anchorage nine and a half hours later, stop for an hour to refuel, and then

All in all, it was timetabled to take only seventeen and a half hours—half of what

It was as drastic a reduction in travel time as when Concorde cut New York to London flights

All the major European carriers set up routes to the far east via Anchorage in the 1960s

While Anchorage sees only a few dozen daily commercial flights mostly to the continental

US today, in the 1970s it was served by Air France, SAS, KLM, Iberia, Lufthansa, Japan

This tiny town in Alaska quickly became one of the most connected and cosmopolitan areas

of the world with passengers and flight crews from all around the world stopping over all

As aircraft became more advanced with longer range, there were a few airlines that managed

to avoid stopping in Anchorage on their way from Europe to East Asia.

Finnair, for example, starting flying from Helsinki to Tokyo non-stop in 1983 by flying

in international airspace north of Russia over the North Pole.

This made what is today a nine hour flight thirteen hours but it was still faster than

Overwhelmingly, though, airlines continued to fly through Anchorage.

Eventually, though, the Soviet Union did of course fall in 1991 and with that Russia started

to grant overflight rights to European and East Asian airlines.

They first had to modernize and anglicize their air traffic control system.

All international pilots and air traffic controllers worldwide speak English but before, since

there were few international flights over Russia, the Russian air traffic controllers

Once the changes were made, airlines quickly switched to flying non-stop from Europe to

The airport built a large and modern international terminal in 1982 to handle all the traffic

passing through the airport but then, less than ten years later, all those airlines that

Today, that international terminal, built to handle hundreds of flights per month, only

Russia, meanwhile, is prospering thanks to the opening up of its airspace.

Flying to Asia over Siberia saves airlines huge amounts of time and money so Russia therefore

charges airlines huge amounts of money to do so.

Exact numbers vary by airline and are kept secret, but for each roundtrip flight between

Europe and Asia, Siberian overflight fees are believed to account for up to $100 of

Russia has an enormous amount of power by controlling this airspace and they use it

133 countries have signed the International Civil Aviation Organization's Transit Agreement

which essentially allows any airline from any country to fly through the signatory's

airspace but Russia, however, has not, so they can pick and choose which country's

airlines get to fly through their airspace.

The country can and has used its airspace as a geopolitical weapon—in 2014 they threatened

to shut down their airspace to European Union airlines in response to sanctions, in 2017

they threatened to close the airspace to Dutch airlines in response to a reduction in landing

slots for a Russian airline at Schiphol airport, and in April 2018 they tacitly threatened

to close their airspace to US airlines in response to US military action in Syria.

But Russia not only decides which countries can fly in its airspace, it also decides which

There is more or less a rule that only one airline per European country can overfly Russia.

There are certainly exceptions—both British Airways and Virgin Atlantic are London based,

for example, but both overfly Siberia on their routes to Shanghai and Hong Kong, but Air

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