Business is business, and India does it with China way more than it used to do. And it would do more with the FSU and with China over airspace use were there to be a complete block of Iranian and Pakistani airspace when it comes to trying to continue service for flights to/from DEL and BOM whose routes most commonly have involved Iranian and/or Pakistani airspace use. Afghanistan is a landlocked country and the only way then in and out of it would be via the FSU, so cheap or not, it wouldn’t be much use except to waste fuel and time.

They would also shift more to going via or closer to some Arab countries too, but that doesn’t entirely preclude increased use of FSU and even Chinese airspace. Airspace shutdowns would mean paying up more, one way or another, for the airlines whose routes would be hit by a complete Iranian and Pakistani airspace closure.

I am not sure. But in 2015 SAS was more than fine with the possibility of BMA being shut down permanently and sold off for other uses. At around that time I think they mentioned that they had no good use for it as an airport for nearly a decade if not longer before the “shut it down” calls came.

I hope BMA remains open as an airport. But I don’t expect it to ever again have regularly scheduled SAS service.

It’s not the Indian government wanting to protect their local airlines from foreign competition. If it had been, then the joke wouldn’t be that Emirates is India’s national carrier. EK provides an international route network from India that puts to shame all Indian carriers together.

The European and European-routing North American carriers have traditionally scheduled their Indian flights mostly to arrive and depart India late at night (including the dark early morning hours) because the airlines wanted to maximize their fleet utilization and because the airlines scheduled that while keeping in mind their US and European connecting traffic in one or both directions. Once India became a major ITES center player, the European and European-transiting North American carriers decided to see what they could do to get in on the business action. Only then did the non-Indian carriers from the EU start making their schedules more useful for a person like me who may have wanted to arrive in India and stay less than 24 hours. What they encountered was the challenge of going up against India’s Emirates, Qatar and Etihad.

The North American and European carriers had dismissed Indians flyers for so long as being worth nothing more than low priced VFR traffic that by the time these carriers wanted into India in more major ways: Indian traffic was already in the pockets of SW Asian and S Asian carriers; and the network and frequency of service provided by the GCC3 had become such competitive behemoths (by way of Indian VFR demand) that the North American and European carriers couldn’t defeat them — not defeat them in regards to network, nor in frequency, nor in just about anything else that mattered enough for the Indian market.

Even with the history of the Indian government owning some Indian airlines, the Indian airline industry never got a whole lot of meaningful competitive gain from whatever protectionism Indian politicians had still been inclined to give the Indian industry in more recent decades. If anything beside problems paying for its import bills got them to open the country for more competition from more non-Indian-state-owned players, it would have been the experience of Air India/Indian Airlines being so bad that would have done that.

SAS used to serve India. But SAS’s entries and exits into the Indian market have been a sort of contrarian business indicator for how the Indian market is going to do.

It’s not been a poor schedule for the EU+ carriers who wouldn’t have been able to make India service work like it did without India-related traffic originating or terminating in the US/Canada going via Europe. And between the history of non-redeye TATL flights to Europe — not a whole lot of such non-redeyes for most of the past three decades (and even less when excluding AF and BA Concorde services) — and the onward schedule from Europe to India, the EU+ carriers had the schedules the EU+ and North American airlines wanted for India and worked for them for most of the last 30 years.

If I had little to no familiarity with the history of aviation in India, it would be easier to be susceptible to blaming the Indian government for the European airlines scheduled to and from India.

[OT] We’re about to manufacture one of our niche products specifically for the Japanese market and, as involved in launches/transfers from a supply chain/technical perspective, I was sent to Tokyo in order to attend some courses, amongst those one which threw a few lights on Japanese culture. The chap running the course didn’t even introduce himself and went straight to the point: “No matter of big and known your organisation is, you’re about to ‘enter’ a country where a train operator was forced to apologise after a service arrived 20 seconds earlier”...

Amongst other things, I was left wondering how all those Japanese tourists could possibly cope with the archaic British railway system... When people here complain about Germany/Denmark/Sweden, I’m guessing they never got on a train in the UK or perhaps their experience is merely limited to tube, DLR or overground, LOL. [/OT]

G