Bad air day: how conflict in Middle East redrew routes

What a difference a week makes. Last Saturday night, a void opened up on the live map of flights in progress on the tracking service Flightradar24.

- Simon Calder

As US bombers struck targets in Iran, the skies over Iran and Iraq cleared. One British Airways plane, having flown from London Heathrow almost all the way to Dubai, turned around and sped back to Europe – landing in Zurich because the fuel and the crew’s hours were running low.

Then on Monday night, the airspace of Qatar suddenly shut as Iranian missiles targeted an American base in the Gulf nation.

At the time, more than 100 planes were converging on Doha. Diversions began at once, coordinated by air-traffic controllers in Bahrain. The first plane to be diverted was a Qatar Airways Boeing 787 Dreamliner from London Gatwick, which was well into its descent into Doha when it was turned away and flew to the Saudi capital, Riyadh. Those passengers were relatively lucky, compared with the thousands who had already spent hours in the air and were simply flown back to where they started.

The most extreme example was Qantas flight 33 from Perth to Paris. The pilots of the ultra-long-haul aircraft were 300 miles off the west coast of India when they were alerted to the unfolding threat. Faced with rerouting to evade multiple threats, the crew turned the 787 around and finally touched down in the Western Australian capital after a 15-hour flight to nowhere.

Within six hours, the skies over Qatar opened again and the painstaking business of recovering the operation began.