11 November 2026

ALG Paper Measures the Cost of the Middle East Air Corridor Breakdown

Rerouting around closed Middle East airspace added about 325nm and 31 minutes to each Paris–Dubai A380 flight in early 2026, costing about €12,400 per flight, according to an ALG paper based on ADS-B data. The study tracks five Europe–Asia route pairs across four phases of the Israel–Iran and US–Iran conflicts.

Rear view of an airliner on approach against a pale blue and pink sky, with the title The Breakdown of the Middle East Air Corridor across the top. — The cover of ALG’s paper, The Breakdown of the Middle East Air Corridor. [ALG]

Edited by:

African Pilot Newsdesk

Why this article matters
Since Russian and Ukrainian airspace closed, the corridor over Iran had become one of the few efficient links between Europe and Asia, and its closure in 2025 and 2026 pushed traffic into narrow passages over the Caucasus or long detours around the Arabian Peninsula. ALG’s paper puts numbers to that disruption, route by route, using tracking data rather than schedules alone. Its central finding is that routes with an endpoint in the affected region suffered far more than long-haul routes with alternative paths.

For African aviation, the paper’s air navigation findings carry the most direct relevance, since Egyptian airspace and Cairo are named among the GNSS interference hotspots along the bypass routes. Displaced traffic flows and degraded navigation affect the capacity and workload of every provider along the detour. The paper establishes a measured baseline for the cost of the closure that airlines and providers can use in planning for future disruptions.

Of Interest
- ALG published The Breakdown of the Middle East Air Corridor in November 2026, based on ADS-B data processed with its ADAPt tool.
- Rerouting added about 325nm and 31 minutes to each Paris–Dubai flight during the US–Iran conflict, an estimated €12,400 per A380 flight.
- Jeddah–Tashkent flight volume fell by almost 98% during the Israel–Iran conflict in 2025.
- Azerbaijan’s overflights rose from 47,065 in 2021 to 261,085 in 2025.
- Implementation of first-phase requirements of the Middle East air traffic flow management programme stands at 59%.

Rerouting around closed Middle East airspace added about 325 nautical miles and 31 minutes to each Paris–Dubai flight during the US–Iran conflict in early 2026, costing an estimated €12,400 per flight for an Airbus A380, according to a new paper from aviation consultancy ALG.

The paper, The Breakdown of the Middle East Air Corridor, uses ADS-B flight tracking data processed through ALG’s ADAPt tool, combined with OAG schedules, to compare five route pairs that normally cross Iranian airspace: Dubai–Baku, Dubai–Frankfurt, Paris–Dubai, Jeddah–Tashkent and Mumbai–London. It measures them across four periods: a January–March 2025 baseline, the Israel–Iran conflict from 13 June to July 2025, a recovery period from October to December 2025, and the US–Iran conflict from 28 February to March 2026, when 11 flight information regions closed at once.

Jeddah–Tashkent was the most severely affected route, with flight volume falling by almost 98% during the Israel–Iran conflict and never recovering. Dubai–Baku flights were 73 minutes longer on average during the first conflict and 156.5 minutes longer during the second, when distances rose by more than 1,100nm and normal operations fell below 40%. Mumbai–London proved the most resilient, with flight time deviations never exceeding 10.5 minutes even though its distance increased by about 180nm.

ALG cautions that four of the five routes have Dubai or Jeddah as an endpoint, and that Gulf hubs were themselves closed or restricted from 28 February 2026, so the effects of the corridor closure and of disruption at the airports cannot be fully separated. Europe–Middle East traffic as a whole fell by 59% in that period, according to EUROCONTROL data cited in the paper.

For the Paris–Dubai example, the extra distance translated into about 9,330 litres of fuel, or €9,300 at €1.00 a litre, plus around €800 in additional en-route charges and the crew, maintenance and ownership cost of the extra block time. At 116 flights on the route pair in March 2026, ALG puts the additional cost at about €1.4 million for that month.

The View From Air Navigation Service Providers

The paper also looks at the effect on neighbouring air navigation service providers. During the June 2025 closure, Saudi Arabian overflights roughly doubled and Afghan overflights roughly quadrupled. Azerbaijan’s overflights rose from 47,065 in 2021 to 261,085 in 2025, with more than 60 new carriers in its airspace since the crisis began, and the country redesigned its airspace to a declared capacity of 250 to 300 movements an hour.

ALG notes that the bypass corridors coincide with regional GNSS interference hotspots, including Cairo, where controllers routinely fall back on radar vectoring and conventional navigation, reducing effective capacity below declared values. It contrasts Europe’s Network Manager, which has a legal basis to require capacity declarations and flow measures, with the Middle East, where implementation of the first-phase requirements of the regional air traffic flow management programme stands at 59%, leaving displaced traffic to be redistributed by airline flight planning rather than network flow management.

Get the full document here: https://www.alg-global.com/sites/default/files/2026-11/Thebreakdownofthemiddleeastaircorridor.pdf