Airspace restrictions are hurting Air India more severely this year than they did in 2024, an official with knowledge of the carrier's operations told The Economic Times.

The disclosure puts a hard edge on a problem the airline has managed through two consecutive years of constrained routings. Closure or limitation of airspace along key corridors — the same category of disruption that reshaped Asia–Europe flying after conflict-driven shutters went up over Russia and parts of the Middle East — continues to force Air India onto longer flight paths, with direct consequences for fuel burn, block times and schedule resilience.

The official did not attach a specific figure to the deterioration, but the comparative framing itself is significant: an airline still executing its post-Tata-acquisition renewal is absorbing a worsening operating penalty on routes that depend on affected corridors.

Why does the comparison to last year matter?

Air India's long-haul network is weighted toward westbound flying — North America and Europe via corridors that have been subject to successive restrictions since 2022. When overflight options narrow, aircraft burn more fuel, crews run up against duty-time limits, and payload flexibility shrinks on marginal sectors.

A year-over-year worsening means the penalty is not a one-off cost being annualized into the network. It is an escalating constraint, arriving as the carrier takes widebody deliveries under its order book with Airbus and Boeing and tries to build density on precisely the long-range sectors where routings are most exposed.

What are the commercial consequences?

For an airline competing against Gulf and European carriers that face their own routing penalties but operate from different geographies, airspace friction is a structural cost question, not a temporary nuisance. Longer sectors mean:

• Higher fuel cost per revenue passenger on affected routes
• Reduced aircraft utilization as block times stretch
• Tighter scheduling buffers against crew duty limits
• Less headroom to add frequencies with the same fleet

Each of these moves directly against the unit-cost and capacity goals embedded in Air India's expansion plans.

What comes next?

The official's assessment signals that Air India's route planning for the coming schedule cycles will assume a worse airspace environment than the one it planned against a year ago — and until the restrictions ease, the carrier will carry the cost of the detours into its network and pricing decisions.