Middle East overfly and landing rights

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  • Anonymous
    Guest

    MartynSinclair
    Participant

    With talk of El Al joining an Alliance, how does the forum view overfly and landing rights within the Middle East. Some middle eastern airlines, have to make massive detours around neighbouring countries becaue overfly rights are refused. One example is TLV to BKK, increasing journey times significantly and also increasing the infamous carbon footprint.

    Purely in terms of aviation and travel, if an alliance of middle eastern airlines was ever created to include El Al, how would this impact the world wide alliances as nearly all Europe to Asia/Australia flights have to cross the middle east at some point. Would travellers benefit from a middle east alliance?


    TominScotland
    Participant

    Good point, Martyn. We tend to forget the global/ regional politics that impact on air travel in this way. The other example of the inconvenience of no overfly zones used to relate to travel to Taiwan from Europe when mainland China did not permit overflight en route to Taipei. Thus, flights had to loop south via BKK. This has now, thankfully, gone for Taiwanese airlines although KLM (for commercial reasons), continue to operate that routing.


    dutchyankee
    Participant

    This flyover issue of course is really only detrimental to Israeli flagged carriers due to proximitiy of the borders of countries Israel has no formal relationship with. Israeli aircraft can overfly Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and Morocco, which really doesn’t help for a flight to India or Asia. Arab carriers, except those of reciprocal countries, are likewise barred from over-flying Israeli territory, or even the illegally occupied territores of the West Bank and Gaza, but have many other routes they can take. Things were slightly better/easier prior to the revolution in Iran which gave Iran the current Islamic government. Prior to this, under the Shah, there were actually direct flights between Teheran and Tel Aviv on a number of foreign flagged carriers including BA VC-10’s and 707’s as well as Air France, Alitalia, and others. Rights to over-fly Iranian territory were given to Israeli flagged aircraft during that time as Iran and Israel had formal relations. Don’t feel too sorry for the Israeli’s though, as anyone having flown into Tel Aviv will know, Israel makes it damn uncomfortable for anyone arriving and departing Tel Aviv that has an Arab Country’s stamp in their passport (even for an American). You are made to feel like a terrorist or criminal or both!


    JMJr613
    Participant

    Flying is difficult enough these days without more political issues.
    But lets not forget that you can’t even enter some Arab countries with an Israeli stamp in your passport much less having difficulty at airport security/passport control lines.

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