Pahalgam — a year after, Indian aviation is still facing headwinds

On the morning of 22 April last year, terrorists attacked civilian tourists at Pahalgam, killing over 25 people in broad daylight. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was on an official visit to Saudi Arabia, rushed to the capital, chairing meetings and planning a response. One of the immediate steps that the government took was to suspend the Indus Water Treaty with Pakistan. In retaliation, the Pakistani government closed its airspace for Indian carriers on 24 April 2026.

One year down the line, the airspace remains closed, and with more and more airspace being unavailable, the impact on Indian aviation continues to be negative. It has become a year that airlines in India would want to forget quickly and move ahead.

What is the impact?

The closure of Pakistani airspace had an immediate impact on Air India, which has service to points in Europe and multiple cities in the USA and Canada from its primary hub in Delhi. For flights to Europe, the airline saw an increase in block times, leading to misconnecting passengers as an immediate aftermath. However, a larger impact was on flights to North America, which were non-stop but could no longer be non-stop due to the increased block times. This meant that the airline had to look for technical stops, and it improvised its operations based on winds, loads and more as time progressed. Air India has since had technical stops at Vienna as well as Kolkata and is using some new routings to optimise the available airspace. The technical stop takes away the edge which the airline has for a non-stop offering.

Air India was not the only airline impacted. IndiGo had announced a deal with European carrier Norse Atlantic for damp-leased Dreamliner aircraft and ambitions to fly to Europe. The airline subsequently inducted all six planes, but instead of a large hub in Delhi, it split the operations between Mumbai and Delhi, with Mumbai being a bigger operation.

The impact was prima facie international, but affected domestic skies too. Last year, airlines were hoping for a bumper summer in North India with flights to Srinagar crossing 50 a day, the highest ever. Not only did the flights see cancellations as Operation Sindoor started, but the numbers are not seen again even this year.

Not just planes, crew and passengers too were affected

The impact of the closure was felt not just on routings, increased flying times and maintenance costs, but also on crew scheduling. An additional landing on a long- haul flight impacts crew rostering due to the prevalent rules. This also impacts maintenance costs since most components of an aircraft are linked to hours and cycles or a combination of both. A cycle is one take-off and one landing, and an additional take-off and landing means double the cycles than initially planned for a long-haul flight.

On the rostering front, long-haul flights have different rules for duty times. It often involves having two sets of crew: one which does take-off and landing and another which flies the plane in between. With an additional landing and take-off, the crew patterns changed, and so did the expenditure to have the crew stay at new places in Europe and not their home base. This increased the crew requirement, something which wasn’t planned since the situation never demanded.

Airspace closure not the only hit

Towards the end of May, things started normalising and looked promising again. The peak summer season may have been lost, but all was not lost until on a fine sunny day in June, Air India’s 787-8 Dreamliner crashed in Ahmedabad immediately after take-off. Bound for London, this saw the death of all but one passenger on board. The overall caution by passengers after such a major tragedy generally leads to a lowering of traffic. IndiGo and Air India both reduced domestic flights in the off-peak monsoon months as they reeled under the subsequent challenges.

Tail Note

Airlines in India would have hoped for a better start to the new financial year. However, things are not the way they wished. A month before the end of a year which could have been forgotten, Israel, the USA and Iran got into a conflict. This conflict has pushed up oil prices, posing challenges like no other. Just when things looked promising, the unknown turned the tide. How long will the conflict last and what will be the long-term repercussions is anybody’s guess at the moment. For the airlines, it has become impossible to find as many passengers willing to pay as much fare to make the operations at breakeven levels. Profit is an afterthought right now for most.

The author, Ameya Joshi, is an aviation analyst.