The Quiet Arms Race Keeping Your Flight Safe
There’s a peculiar irony at the heart of modern aviation. We can fly a widebody jet halfway around the world on autopilot, track every aircraft in real time via satellite, and model weather systems days in advance. Yet the simple act of deciding where to safely fly that jet has become one of the industry’s most complex operational challenges. Safe airspace is shrinking, and the tools airlines use to navigate this reality are evolving in ways most passengers never see.
The catalyst for this shift isn’t a single event. It’s an accumulation. Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine closed vast swaths of polar airspace. Israel and Iran’s 2025 missile exchanges shuttered flight information regions across Iraq, Syria, and Iran. U.S. air strikes on Venezuela in January 2026 temporarily locked down Caribbean corridors. And through it all, GPS interference has surged from an occasional nuisance to roughly 1,000 daily incidents worldwide—a figure that feels almost absurd until you consider the forces driving it.
For airlines, the question is no longer whether to take geopolitical risk seriously. It’s whether their risk management systems are fast enough, rigorous enough, and objective enough to keep pace with threats that shift by the hour.
Counting Warships From a Desktop
One of the more striking developments in aviation risk intelligence is how much of it now relies on tracking military hardware in near real time. Osprey Flight Solutions, a UK-based aviation risk firm founded in 2017, has built an approach that reads geopolitical threats the way a meteorologist reads pressure systems—by looking for the precursors.
Matthew Borie, Osprey’s chief intelligence officer, described the methodology in stark terms during a recent briefing. When the Trump administration threatened strikes on Iran in mid-January, Osprey’s assessment diverged from the prevailing media narrative. Despite the heated rhetoric, the firm concluded that strikes were unlikely within a 7- to 14-day window because the Pentagon simply hadn’t positioned sufficient assets in the region. They knew this because they were watching—tracking fighter jet deployments, aircraft carrier movements, air defense installations, and comparing the buildup against what had been in place during prior escalation cycles in April 2024 and June 2025.
“The objective data point for escalation had not been met,” Borie explained. “But now fighter jets, air defenses, and aircraft carriers have arrived, which are key indicators of military strikes. We look for objective data to fill subjective gaps.”
That phrasing—”objective data to fill subjective gaps”—captures something important about where aviation security is heading. The industry has historically relied on government advisories, NOTAMs, and intelligence briefings that often arrive late and leave interpretation to individual operators. Firms like Osprey are trying to close that gap with satellite imagery, automated data scraping from hundreds of thousands of open-source feeds, and AI-driven anomaly detection that can flag changes in military posture before official channels react.
The approach proved prescient with Venezuela. In late November 2025, when U.S. action was already being discussed in diplomatic circles, Osprey warned its clients to expect air strikes within six weeks. Barely four weeks later, the strikes came and the airspace was closed at short notice. Airlines that had planned ahead could reroute; those that hadn’t were scrambling.
The Domino Effect Nobody Talks About
One of the less appreciated aspects of conflict-zone risk management is that the first shot fired is rarely the only one that matters. Borie emphasized this point with a scenario that should give any airline operations manager pause: after the initial strikes on Iran, you might still technically be able to fly to Dubai. But have you already war-gamed the second and third order effects? Iranian drone or missile retaliation targeting the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel, or Iraq could close additional airspace with almost no warning.
This cascading risk problem is exactly what made the 2025 Israel-Iran exchanges so disruptive. Eurocontrol estimated that up to 2,000 flights per day were being canceled during the peak summer period due to the combined effects of Ukraine-related restrictions and Middle Eastern airspace closures. Flights between Europe and Asia—already stretched by Russia’s closed polar airspace—had to be rerouted even further. The average time extension for affected long-haul flights exceeded 90 minutes, and on the most exposed corridors, block time increases reached 210 minutes.
These aren’t temporary inconveniences. Several carriers have issued permanent schedule adjustments. Entire wave structures at Gulf and Southern European hubs have been reconfigured to accommodate predictable delays. Minimum connection times have increased. Same-day onward connections have been reduced. The long-haul route model that underpinned global aviation connectivity through the 2010s was designed for a world where the major airspace corridors between continents remained open. That assumption no longer holds.
And the costs are stacking up in ways that don’t always make headlines. Widebody aircraft like the A330 and 777, operating on extended southern routing from Europe to Southeast Asia, are being capped at reduced takeoff weights to comply with diversion contingency fuel margins. Across selected Asia-Europe corridors, average cargo uplift per flight is down roughly 14% compared to pre-2025 levels. For routes that previously depended on freight margins to stay economically viable, that reduction is material.
The GPS Problem Is Worse Than You Think
If rerouting around conflict zones is aviation’s obvious headache, GNSS interference is its quieter migraine. The numbers are startling. According to SkAI Data Services, approximately 1,000 daily incidents of GPS jamming or spoofing occurred globally in 2025—up from about 700 in 2024. Honeywell puts the figure even higher, citing more than 1,500 flights threatened daily.
The December 2024 downing of Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 crystallized why this matters so acutely. The Embraer E190, carrying 67 people from Baku to Grozny, lost GPS as it entered Russian airspace—a direct consequence of military jamming used to counter Ukrainian drone operations. The aircraft was then struck by a Russian surface-to-air missile, reportedly from a Pantsir-S1 system. Thirty-eight people died. The crew’s final transmissions make for harrowing reading: “Both GPS’s are lost, we need vectoring.”
That tragedy was not an isolated collision of unfortunate circumstances. It was the predictable outcome of a systemic problem. The Baltic Sea has become such a persistent hotspot for GNSS interference that it’s been dubbed the “Bermuda Triangle” of GPS disruption. Finnair suspended flights to Estonia’s Tartu airport in 2024 after repeated GPS outages made landings impossible. In April 2024, 117 vessels in the Eastern Mediterranean were simultaneously spoofed—their navigation systems tricked into displaying positions at Beirut Airport. By June 2025, over 3,000 vessels in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz were disrupted in less than two weeks.
The core vulnerability is architectural. Civilian GNSS signals are weak by the time they reach the earth’s surface and lack cryptographic authentication, making them relatively easy to overpower with cheap jamming equipment or deceive with counterfeit signals. Modern aircraft and their flight management systems trust GPS inputs by default. Without independent verification from inertial navigation systems, ground-based beacons, or radar, a spoofed aircraft can be guided off course without the crew initially realizing anything is wrong.
EASA and IATA published a joint action plan in mid-2025 acknowledging that GPS interference has transitioned from an exceptional event to an ongoing operational condition. The plan calls for standardized radio calls for reporting interference, real-time airspace monitoring, and tighter export controls on jamming devices. Europe’s Galileo system has begun rolling out Open Service Navigation Message Authentication—a cryptographic verification layer—but widespread adoption remains years away.
The Insurance Squeeze
The financial architecture supporting aviation in contested airspace is shifting too, and not in operators’ favor. War risk insurance premiums have increased significantly due to geopolitical volatility, according to multiple market reports. The Russia-Ukraine conflict left an especially deep mark: hundreds of leased aircraft seized in Russia spawned multi-billion-dollar legal battles that are still working through the courts, injecting systemic uncertainty into how insurers price conflict-related risk.
Lease agreements signed since early 2026 include region-specific deployment clauses for widebody aircraft. Where a plane is intended for routes transiting flight information regions classified as high-risk by Eurocontrol, the lease terms are being repriced. Security deposits are increasing. In some cases, lease durations are being shortened. And for carriers that fail to reroute after a conflict event, claims coverage may be challenged under policy conditions requiring adherence to the most restrictive NOTAMs and state advisories.
The hull war insurance market specifically has seen some countervailing dynamics. WTW analysis noted that new market entrants drove rate reductions of more than 10% in some hull war segments during 2025, creating short-term relief for buyers. But reinsurers have signaled they want direct insurers to hold firm, threatening penal action on treaty programs that renew in 2026 if rates continue to soften. The tension between competitive pressure and reinsurer pushback creates an unstable equilibrium—one that a single major incident could tip sharply.
For operators, the practical implication is clear: decisions about where to fly are increasingly shaped not just by safety assessments but by what insurers will cover at what price. Some commercial routes become functionally unviable once war risk premiums are factored in, even if the airspace remains technically open.
Automating the Hardest Decision
What connects these threads—military intelligence analysis, cascading airspace closures, GPS warfare, insurance repricing—is the recognition that aviation risk management can no longer be a reactive, personality-dependent process. The old model, where a duty officer made routing decisions based on experience, government advisories, and gut instinct, breaks down when threats multiply and shift faster than any individual can track.
Osprey’s Borie made this point with uncommon directness: “Try to avoid risk acceptance or avoidance coming down to one individual so that it doesn’t matter who is on shift at the time. Everyone at the operator should be involved in the oversight so that you don’t have a blame culture. Then you can make the right decisions, whether to escalate or de-escalate responses, based on your risk tolerance.”
The push toward automation and systematization is happening across the industry. ICAO’s Doc 10084 Risk Assessment Manual—updated after the Ukraine invasion and now in its third edition—provides the foundational framework, but firms like Osprey are building the operational layer on top. Their systems integrate flight plan feeds, automatically assess risk for every scheduled flight, and issue real-time alerts when the risk environment changes. The goal is to make the process consistent and repeatable regardless of who’s sitting at the console.
IATA’s Flight Data Exchange program, which collects operational data from over 300 participating airlines, is developing new parameters specifically for GPS spoofing detection. Analysis of enhanced ground proximity warning system activations during arrivals and departures—events that can be triggered by spoofed position data—has been proposed as another layer of systematic monitoring. The European Cockpit Association has gone further, recommending that individual crew members retain the right to refuse and step away from conflict-zone duties, acknowledging the psychological toll of operating in threat environments.
What Nobody Wants to Admit
Here’s the uncomfortable truth embedded in all of this: the system is adapting, but it’s adapting to a world that’s getting worse. The geographic scope of “over or near conflict zones,” as ICAO defines it, has expanded significantly in recent years. From Russia’s restricted polar airspace to Yemen’s devastated infrastructure, from the GPS-jammed Baltic to the missile-threatened Gulf, the safe corridors are narrowing. Airlines flying between Asia and Europe—the most economically significant long-haul market in the world—now depend on Central Asian and Middle Eastern airspace corridors that face the credible threat of further disruption.
The industry response has been impressive in many respects. The information-sharing architecture is more mature than it was a decade ago. The analytical tools are sharper. The regulatory frameworks, while always lagging behind events, are at least pointed in the right direction. The 2026 World Overflight Risk Conference in Malta this April—co-organized by Osprey, EASA, Transport Malta, and the University of Southampton—will tackle geopolitical instability, cybersecurity, hybrid warfare, and drone threats under one umbrella. The fact that such a conference exists, and that it draws government regulators and commercial operators to the same table, signals a level of institutional seriousness that wasn’t present even five years ago.
But the fundamental problem remains: aviation’s risk management capabilities are running to keep up with a threat landscape that’s accelerating. The tools to monitor military buildups from open-source intelligence, detect GPS interference in real time, and automate risk scoring across entire flight networks represent genuine progress. Whether that progress is enough—whether the industry can stay ahead of the next cascading crisis rather than merely reacting to it—is the question that keeps operational risk managers up at night.
And maybe the most unsettling thought of all: for the roughly 4.5 billion passengers who board commercial flights each year, this entire ecosystem of threat analysis, satellite monitoring, insurance negotiation, and airspace chess operates entirely out of sight. The safest outcome is one where they never have to think about it at all. The question is whether the system can sustain that invisibility as the world it operates in grows less predictable by the month.
This article was produced in accordance with our editorial standards. Aviantics maintains strict editorial independence.
