A civil aviation official in a statement said on Wednesday, Pakistani airspace on its eastern border with India is going to stay closed till the mid June (June 14), the latest extension months after a standoff in the middle of the arch rivals.
As per to an official, “We don’t expect the ban to be lifted anytime soon. It may take a while.”
Pakistan shut its airspace in the month of February after a suicide attack by a Pakistan-based militant group in Kashmir which then later led to aerial bombing missions on each other’s soil and a fighter conflict over Kashmir.
Foreign carriers which are using Indian airspace have been forced in order to take expensive alternative route for the reason that they cannot fly over Pakistan. The shutting of Pakistani airspace is mainly affecting to those flights that are travelling from Europe to Southeast Asia.
“The closure will continue until June 14,” a spokesperson for Pakistan’s Civil Aviation Authority said.
Pakistan lies in the middle of a vital aviation passageway and the airspace constraints influencing hundreds of commercial as well as cargo flights every day, adding flight time for passengers along with fuel costs for airlines.
National carrier Air India has extended haul (14-16 hours) flights to New York, Newark, Chicago, Washington and also San Francisco. Because of the airspace closure, the flights from Delhi are being channelled through Omani as well as Iranian airspace. The alteration in the route means more fuel burn, extra time as well as more manpower service.
It is believed that due to the change in route have the national carrier Air India have suffered a major loss. “We would not want to comment on this. It’s a diplomatic matter,” an Air India spokesperson said in a conversation with news agency.
Previous Executive Director Air India Jitendra Bhargava said postponement of air space conclusion by Pakistan was predictable.
“Pakistan is unlikely to open the airspace unilaterally. Considering its importance for Indian carriers, Pakistan will like to make it a part of a package that leads to talks and normilisation of relations,” Jitendra Bhargava said.
As per to the senior AI official who had said recently that, “The closure has affected us in two ways. One is the daily extra expense incurred due to factors like more fuel burn, enhanced crew requirement due to longer routes of flights to Europe and the US and the stopover necessitated by that. Second, due to this we are not able to operate some flights and have deployed narrow-body aircraft on certain routes where wide-body aircraft would earlier go. The combined figure of extra expense and revenue foregone is about Rs 6 crore per day.”
