Helsinki has long been a hub for flights linking the UK and continental Europe with Russia and east Asia. But the ban on using Russian airspace means its main airline, Finnair, is making widespread cancellations. On the remaining Asian flights, airspace closures mean extremely long routings.
Tonight’s flights from the Finnish capital to Tokyo and Osaka in Japan, and Seoul in Korea, have been cancelled – along with multiple services to Moscow and St Petersburg.
All links to and from Japan, Korea and China have been cancelled until Sunday 6 March at the earliest, with all flights to Russia grounded until 28 May.
The airline said: “We continue flying from Helsinki to Bangkok, Phuket, Singapore and Delhi.
“We will avoid using the Russian airspace which lengthens the travel time by approximately one hour.”
In fact evidence of Finnair flight 142 from Singapore to Helsinki shows the flight time extended by over two hours compared with services overflying Russia.
Tuesday’s departure took a convoluted route over Saudi Arabia and Egypt, before turning northwest. The Airbus A350 flew as far west as Kosice in Slovakia before turning north-north-east for Helsinki. The shortest distance of 5,761 miles was extended to around 7,000 miles.
Robert Boyle, the former director of strategy for IAG, parent company of British Airways, wrote in his blog: “The geographic position of Helsinki has allowed Finnair to operate highly efficient aircraft schedules to North East Asia.
“For example, flights to Tokyo leave Helsinki at 5.30pm, arriving at 10am the following day. A quick turnaround sees them depart back again at 11am, arriving in Helsinki again at 3pm.
“That’s in time to operate the next flight back again to Asia. So that means that a daily flight uses just one aircraft. Adding three hours to the journey time each way to avoid Russia would destroy that. Very loosely, they would need twice as many aircraft to operate the same number of flights.”
Since Friday, the share price of Finnair has fallen by almost one-third, from 57 cents to 39 cents.
