As the crisis continues to unfold in the Middle East and Gulf Region, EUROCONTROL’s new European Aviation Trends paper takes a timely look at how this is impacting European aviation, from reduced traffic flows to airspace and airport closures, diverted and repatriation flights, and rerouting distortions.
It finds that since hostilities began just over a month ago on Saturday 28 February 2026, the impact on the European aviation network has been the following:
- 59% fewer flights to/from the Middle East to Europe – around 1,200 daily flights below the normal 2,000
- 56% fewer flights if we include not only flights to/from the Middle East but also ones that overfly Europe, mainly to/from North America (-1,360 daily flights)
- 1,150 flights impacted every day in terms of reroutings to avoid the conflict area & closed airspaces
- 206K km additionally flown by these reroutings every day
- 602 tons extra fuel burnt every day
- 1.9K excess tons of CO2 emissions every day.
Nevertheless, as EUROCONTROL Director General Raúl Medina underlines, “the European aviation network remains resilient despite these impacts, with global network traffic up 2% compared to 2025 right now, and flows up to all other regions by between 4% and 23%. In all of this, EUROCONTROL as the Network Manager continues to work closely with ANSPs, airports, aircraft operators and partner organisations in these difficult times, ensuring strong coordination and delivering transparent and objective reporting on network impacts to all its stakeholders”.