Iran closed its airspace to most international flights for several hours, disrupting flights of some airlines from Central Asia and other regions amid concerns about conflict between Iran and the United States.
On Thursday morning, the Flightradar24 website, which provides live tracking of flights around the world, showed a number of civilian aircraft again operating in Iranian airspace after it was reopened.
However, many planes were skirting Iran because of safety concerns after U.S. President Donald Trump said the United States was considering strikes on Iran because of the government’s deadly crackdown on nationwide protests. On Wednesday, Trump said he had received assurances that the killings of demonstrators had stopped, possibly signaling that the two adversaries were moving toward de-escalation.
Kazakhstan’s Air Astana was among the airlines affected by the temporary disruption to flight paths over Iran.
“Air Astana informs about changes in the routes of some regular and charter flights due to the closure of Iranian airspace,” the airline said. “Flights to Sharm el-Sheikh, Dubai, Doha and Medina will be carried out in a detour around Iranian airspace.”
The Uzbekistan Airports company said some flights were forced to return to airports from which they had departed. It listed six flights traveling between Uzbekistan and Kuwait, as well as Medina and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, that were not able to complete their journeys. The affected airlines were FlyOne Asia, Jazeera Airways, Sam Air, Fly Khiva and Uzbekistan Airways.
