Changes in the Eastern European Air Transportation System Caused by War in Ukraine

Russian military invasion of Ukraine caused to closure of Ukrainian airspace on February 24, 2022, and significantly limited to use of airspaces of the Russian Federation and Belarus. In addition, airspaces of countries in the Middle East region are limited in use due to the high risk of military action. The size of closed and limited in-use airspaces reach 30.18 M km squared. However, the most significant is configuration, which affects direct flight connections from Europe and North America to Asian destinations. The paper provides a comprehensive study of the impact caused by the war in Ukraine on air transportation in Eastern Europe. The paper includes results of involved airspace geometry analysis with the help of a global air transportation graph, statistical analysis of reconfiguration of air traffic in Eastern Europe, and estimation losses of Ukrainian air navigation service provider caused by using detour trajectories. Also, we analyzed the impact of Ukrainian ground facilities of navigation aids lock into the performance of the European navigation aids network. A global air transportation graph is used to estimate the impact of closed airspace configuration on air transportation network by parameters of additional trajectory length and horizontal flight efficiency (HFE). Affected areas and destinations by particular levels of additional trajectory length and HFE are estimated for common departure airport as cumulative functions. Performance of reconfigured airplane trajectories, to avoid entering closed airspace, has been analyzed with Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast data sets. Results of statistical analysis of detour trajectories in Eastern-European airspace show that above 757 flights used detour trajectories during one week in August of 2024. The total additional trajectory length, in comparison to the great circle length, for these flights reached 476.2 K km. The results of the study provide an overall analysis of the impact caused by the war in Ukraine on the air transportation system and could be useful for aviation safety improvement.