This is no longer a forecast. Since February 28, when a joint US–Israeli operation against Iran began, Indian carriers alone have cancelled more than 4,300 flights, foreign airlines another 1,200, and on a single weekend in early March more than 350 Indian services were grounded as Tehran, Baghdad, Kuwait, Israeli and Iraqi airspace closed in a contiguous block. More than two months in, Air India is still running its New York and Newark services through technical stops at Rome Fiumicino because direct routings are no longer feasible, and the Directorate General of Civil Aviation continues to advise Indian carriers to avoid the airspace of eleven countries. None of this has made global front pages, because the carriers absorbing the worst of it are not household names in London or New York. That is precisely the point. The damage is concentrated, it is recurring, and it is sitting on balance sheets that were never built to carry it.

El Al’s shareholders, by contrast, have already lived through the re-rating. Israeli carriers have been operating under quasi-permanent stress since October 2023, which means the worst of the adjustment is behind them and the equity has absorbed it. The carriers worth writing about are the ones that have not done that work — the ones flying network economics built on an Iranian, Iraqi and Eastern Mediterranean airspace assumption that has now been falsified for over two months straight and is still being treated as a temporary inconvenience.

The mechanics are unromantic. When a corridor closes, replacement routings add anywhere from forty minutes to three hours per sector, which translates into extra fuel burn, payload restrictions on the longest routes, crew duty re-timings that ripple through the next three rotations, technical stops that did not exist in the schedule, and war-risk insurance surcharges that arrive within days. None of it is recoverable through yield in the short run, because competitors are absorbing the same shock simultaneously and nobody has the pricing power to pass it through cleanly. The pain is not evenly........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)