This is the problem the phonetic alphabet solves. And the solution, examined closely, is both more carefully designed and considerably stranger than most people assume.

The problem with letters

The human voice over a radio doesn’t transmit perfectly. Frequencies compress, static intrudes, accents change vowel sounds, and in the cockpit there’s engine noise, headset quality variation, and the accumulated cognitive load of flying an aircraft. In these conditions, individual letters become genuinely ambiguous.

B and P sound similar. M and N sound similar. D, E, and T are hard to distinguish at low quality. C and Z overlap in some accents. F and S blend together. The letter V, spoken plainly, can disappear entirely in a noisy environment.

The solution is to represent each letter with a complete spoken word — chosen specifically because it sounds different from every other word on the list, is recognisable across a wide range of accents, and is short enough to say quickly. One word per letter. Problem solved.

Except that getting 26 words that all meet these criteria across multiple languages, dozens of accents, and poor transmission quality turns out to be remarkably difficult. It took several decades of attempts, two world wars, and the combined resources of international aviation to produce a definitive list.

The first attempts were memorable, briefly

The earliest phonetic alphabets emerged from military necessity in the First World War, when radio communication went from novelty to operational requirement almost overnight. The British Army landed on: Ack, Beer, Cork, Don, Edward, Freddie, George, Harry, Ink, Johnnie, King, London, Emma, Nuts, Oranges, Pip, Queen, Robert, Sugar, Toc, Uncle, Vic, William, X-ray, Yorker, Zebra.

This alphabet worked adequately among British English speakers. It worked less well among anyone else, which was a problem once other nations became involved.

The Americans had their own version. By the Second World War, the US military was using: Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, Fox, George, How, Item, Jig, King, Love, Mike, Nan, Oboe, Peter, Queen, Roger, Sugar, Tare, Uncle, Victor, William, X-ray, Yoke, Zebra.

The Able Baker alphabet was widely used among Allied forces and served reasonably well for the duration of the war. Some of its words survive into the current alphabet — Charlie, Mike, Victor, and X-ray made the cut. Others did not.

“Love” for L was retired. The reasons are left as an exercise for the reader. “Oboe” for O required knowing what an oboe is, which is a specific instrument in the woodwind family and not a universal piece of knowledge. “Jig” for J was dropped, largely because a jig is a type of dance or a fishing lure depending on your cultural background, and neither translates cleanly. “Roger” for R survived as a phrase — meaning “message received” — long after the actual letter assignment changed. Hence the word you’ve heard in every film involving a radio.

ICAO takes over

After the Second World War, the newly formed International Civil Aviation Organization began the project of creating a single phonetic alphabet that would work internationally. This was more complicated than it sounds, for the straightforward reason that most of the candidate words were English, and the people who needed to understand them were not all English speakers.

The key requirement was mutual intelligibility across languages. A word had to be recognisable to a Brazilian pilot, a Japanese controller, a Swedish airline captain, and a Nigerian traffic manager, all in the same radio transmission, at variable quality. Words were tested with speakers from different language backgrounds. Words that failed — that were misheard, mispronounced in ways that confused them with other words, or that simply didn’t exist in certain language groups — were replaced.

The testing revealed some interesting problems. Words with sounds that don’t exist in certain languages were systematically misheard. Words that had near-homophones in major languages caused confusion. The requirement to find 26 words that cleared all these hurdles, while still being short and easy to say, significantly constrained the options.

The current NATO/ICAO alphabet was finalised in 1956 and has remained essentially unchanged since. That is nearly seventy years of the same twenty-six words, which suggests either that the designers got it right or that nobody has been sufficiently motivated to revisit it.

The words themselves

Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu.

Some of these choices seem obvious in retrospect. Hotel is internationally recognisable because hotels exist everywhere and their name is similar in most major European languages. Sierra is a Spanish word for mountain range, chosen partly because Spanish-speaking countries represent a significant portion of aviation operations. Papa is French for father and works across a wide range of languages.

Some choices are more idiosyncratic.

Golf and Foxtrot are both dances — no, wait, Golf is a sport and Foxtrot is a dance. They are both in the alphabet. They are both G and F. The reason Golf was chosen for G is that it passes the intelligibility test — it’s short, distinctive, and the word exists in many languages either natively or as a loanword from English. The reason Foxtrot was chosen over “Fox” is that two syllables are more distinctive than one, reducing the risk of misidentification at poor transmission quality.

Whiskey is perhaps the most cheerfully impractical choice in the list. Aviation controllers worldwide are required to say “Whiskey” to represent the letter W. This includes controllers whose religion prohibits alcohol, passengers overhearing the frequency, and anyone attempting to maintain professionalism while telling a flight that its destination has the call sign Whiskey Lima Hotel. Aviation is a serious industry. The letter W is not.

Juliett is spelled the French/Shakespearean way, not as it would be pronounced in some languages. The official ICAO pronunciation is “JEW-lee-ET,” which is the French pronunciation of a name that is primarily known to English speakers from a play about ill-fated Italian teenagers. This is fine because it works on the radio. It is also slightly absurd.

Lima, the capital of Peru, represents the letter L. This creates the specific problem that “Lima” is also a type of bean. When a controller says “Lima,” they mean L. When the same word appears in a grocery list, it means something else entirely. Aviation chose the city; the beans remain uncatalogued.

Quebec represents Q, with the official pronunciation “KEH-BECK” — the French pronunciation of the Canadian province, specifically to distinguish it from any English Q-word. Quebec the actual province is in Canada. Quebec the phonetic letter is anywhere there’s a radio. The people of Quebec are presumably pleased to be represented in international aviation communications.

November is a month. It is also the letter N. Every aviation context in which you hear “November” means one of these two things, and context usually makes it clear. Usually.

Zulu and the timezone nobody asked for

The letter Z in the ICAO alphabet is Zulu. Z is also the designation for Coordinated Universal Time — what used to be called Greenwich Mean Time. In aviation, all times are expressed in UTC, and UTC is expressed as Zulu.

This means that a departure time of 14:00 UTC is said as “1400 Zulu.” A flight plan filed for 0800 UTC says “0800 Zulu.” Weather observations, NOTAMs, ATC clearances — all reference Zulu time because it removes any ambiguity about what timezone is meant when operations span multiple countries and time zones.

The city of Zulu’s contribution to global aviation timekeeping is that there is no city called Zulu. It’s an ethnic group and kingdom in South Africa whose name was chosen for the letter Z in 1956. They did not anticipate that their name would become synonymous with UTC for the entire global aviation community. They were also not consulted.

The Numbers Weren't Safe Either

The phonetic alphabet isn’t the only thing aviation standardised for intelligibility reasons. Numbers were also adjusted.

"Nine" is pronounced "niner" and "five" is pronounced "fife." The primary reason is that "nine" and "five" can sound similar enough on a degraded radio transmission — both single syllable, both sharing vowel sounds in certain accents — to create dangerous ambiguity. Making one of them two syllables removes the confusion. The German "nein" concern is real but secondary: it's an additional reason cited in official ICAO documentation, not the origin of the change. And "fife" for five has its own separate history — the military disliked "five" because it could be confused with "fire," a command to shoot, which is the kind of miscommunication that tends to end conversations quickly.

The aviation industry took the entire numbering system, examined it for failure modes, and adjusted it accordingly. Then it did the same with the alphabet. The thoroughness is impressive even if some of the results — “fife” and “niner” said with complete seriousness by professional aviators — occasionally seem eccentric.

Where you hear it without knowing

It’s worth noting that most of the alphabet’s words were chosen precisely because they were already internationally recognisable — Greek letters, dance names, place names, Shakespeare characters. The alphabet borrowed from the world, not the other way around.

The genuine exports are few but interesting.

“Roger” is the clearest one. In the old Second World War alphabet, R stood for Roger. Radio operators began using “Roger” to mean “received” — message understood — and the phrase survived the alphabet change in 1956 when R became Romeo. Decades later, “Roger” remains the standard casual confirmation across contexts that have nothing to do with aviation or the military.

“Zulu” for UTC is another genuine export. Before the phonetic alphabet assigned Zulu to Z, nobody called Greenwich Mean Time “Zulu time.” Now every pilot, controller, meteorologist, and military planner worldwide uses the word daily.

“Tango” in military and tactical contexts means an enemy — a hostile target. “Tango down” means the threat has been neutralised. This usage is widespread in military fiction and gaming. Whether this came directly from the phonetic letter assignment or developed independently through military culture is less clear, but it’s now inseparable from the letter.

And then there’s Atlanta. Hartsfield-Jackson is the world’s busiest airport and Delta Airlines’ home hub. The airport train connecting the concourses announces each stop by letter. Concourse D is announced as “Concourse D” — not “Concourse Delta.” The airline’s brand is so dominant at that airport that using the word “Delta” on a public address system would create genuine confusion about whether it means the letter or the carrier. The phonetic alphabet ran into its own word in the real world and had to step aside.

The pilot’s version

In practice, the alphabet is so deeply internalised by pilots and controllers that its use becomes automatic. You stop hearing the words and hear only the letters they represent. A readback of “cleared direct Foxtrot Lima November via Hotel Oscar Lima” lands as an instruction, not as a sentence about foxes, hotels, and November.

The alphabet is also unavoidable in aircraft registrations. Every aircraft has a registration number consisting of a country prefix and an identifier — Poland’s are prefixed SP, the UK’s G, the US N. Each character gets spelled out when communicating with ATC. So an aircraft registered SP-MOJ is identified as “Sierra Papa Mike Oskar Juliett” every time it calls a frequency. The pilots of that aircraft have said those five words many thousands of times and no longer think about them at all.

Somewhere in the world, right now, a controller is instructing an aircraft called Whiskey Lima Hotel to descend, and maintaining the appropriate professionalism throughout.

The alphabet works. It was designed to work. Seventy years of uninterrupted use across the global aviation system is a reasonable indication that it does.

That said, “November” is still a month, “Lima” is still a bean, and Zulu time remains one of the stranger contributions of a South African kingdom to international aviation standardisation.

Do you know the phonetic alphabet by heart — and if not, which letter’s word do you always forget?

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Most passengers have heard of Flightradar24. Fewer actually use it regularly. Even fewer understand how it works or what it can do beyond showing yellow airplane icons moving across a map.

This is a shame, because Flightradar24 is one of the most useful aviation tools ever created for regular people. It’s also one of the most interesting success stories in aviation technology—a hobby project that accidentally became essential infrastructure.

Here’s everything worth knowing about the website that tracks every plane in the sky.

How it started: completely by accident

Flightradar24 began in 2006 when two Swedish aviation enthusiasts, Mikael Robertsson and Olov Lindberg, were running a flight price comparison website called Flygbilligt.com.

They were curious whether they could track aircraft in real-time using ADS-B—Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast—a system where aircraft continuously transmit their position, altitude, speed, and identification.

ADS-B wasn’t new. Aviation authorities had been pushing it for years as a replacement for older radar systems. But nobody had thought to make the data publicly accessible in real-time on a map that anyone could view.

Robertsson and Lindberg bought two ADS-B receivers for about $100 each, installed an antenna on a rooftop in Stockholm, and started collecting data. The receivers picked up signals from aircraft flying within about 300 kilometers.

They added a simple web page showing aircraft positions on a map. It was a side project. Something to drive traffic to their flight price comparison site.

The tracking page became more popular than the price comparison site.

In 2009, they opened the network to volunteers. Anyone with an ADS-B receiver could contribute data. The network expanded rapidly. By 2010, they had coverage across most of Europe.

Then Eyjafjallajökull erupted.

The Icelandic volcano grounded thousands of flights across Europe in April 2010. International media needed a way to show the scope of the disruption. They turned to Flightradar24, which could display empty airspace in real-time—something that had never been visualized publicly before.

Four million people visited the site during the eruption. Flightradar24 went from hobby project to global infrastructure overnight.

How it actually works

Most modern commercial aircraft broadcast their position using ADS-B transponders. The system was designed for air traffic control, but the signals are unencrypted and anyone with a receiver can pick them up.

Flightradar24’s network now includes over 50,000 ADS-B receivers worldwide. Most are owned by volunteers—aviation enthusiasts who install receivers on their rooftops and stream data to Flightradar24’s servers in exchange for free premium subscriptions.

A single receiver can track aircraft within about 300 kilometers line-of-sight. The denser the network, the better the coverage. Europe and North America have excellent coverage because receiver density is high. Remote areas have gaps.

To fill the gaps, Flightradar24 added satellite-based ADS-B receivers starting in 2020. Satellites pick up signals from aircraft flying over oceans and remote regions where ground receivers don’t reach. Aircraft tracked via satellite appear blue on the map. Aircraft tracked by ground receivers appear yellow.

The system also uses multilateration—MLAT—which can track aircraft even without ADS-B by measuring time differences between when signals arrive at multiple receivers. This works for older aircraft that haven’t been retrofitted with ADS-B transponders.

In the United States, Canada, and Australia, Flightradar24 supplements ADS-B data with radar feeds from aviation authorities. This provides complete coverage even in areas where ADS-B reception is sparse.

The result: Flightradar24 tracks over 250,000 flights daily and has over 4 million users per day. It’s the largest ADS-B network in the world. The Guardian newspaper calls it “authoritative.”

Not bad for a hobby project that started with two receivers on a Swedish rooftop.

When the World watches

Flightradar24’s traffic spikes during aviation incidents and geopolitical events. The pattern is consistent: something happens, people want to know what’s in the air, and millions turn to Flightradar24.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared in March 2014. Media reported conflicting information about where the aircraft crashed. Flightradar24 had tracked MH370 as it left the Malaysian coast, then lost signal. For about 12 hours, media reported crashes in China, Vietnam, landings at various airports. Then they checked Flightradar24’s data and corrected their reporting. The last confirmed position was off the Malaysian coast. That’s where the search eventually focused.

After that incident, Flightradar24 began recording all raw data from receivers so they could retrieve it after disasters. The system now stores everything.

Four months later, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over Ukraine. Flightradar24’s servers crashed within five minutes as millions tried to access tracking data. The company had to rapidly scale infrastructure to handle the load.

In August 2022, when Nancy Pelosi flew to Taiwan on a U.S. Air Force plane designated SPAR19, over 2.9 million people tracked at least part of the flight. It became the most-tracked flight in Flightradar24’s history at that time.

Three months later, that record was broken. When Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin was flown from Edinburgh to London in November 2022, 6 million people tried to track the flight in the first minute after the transponder activated. Nearly 5 million followed at least part of the journey.

The site has become the default place to watch aviation events unfold in real-time. When the Iran conflict erupted in February 2026 and airspace restrictions reshaped Middle Eastern flight routes, Flightradar24’s traffic quadrupled to 20 million visitors in a single day.

Pilots use it operationally. When inbound aircraft are delayed, pilots check Flightradar24 to see where the plane is and estimate arrival time. When winds shift and runway configurations change, pilots check which runway is active. Chris Lomas, a commercial pilot, told reporters: “I don’t think I know anyone in the operational side of aviation who doesn’t use it. It’s so intrinsic to what we do.”

Airlines use it for fleet monitoring. Airports use it for operations planning. Media uses it for incident reporting. Insurance companies and analysts use it for research. Enthusiasts use it because watching aircraft is fascinating.

Everyone uses it because it works.

What you can actually do with it

The free version of Flightradar24 is surprisingly capable.

Open the website or app and you see aircraft moving in real-time across a map. Click any aircraft and you get: flight number, aircraft type and registration, origin and destination airports, current altitude and speed, departure and arrival times.

That’s enough for most casual use. Tracking a specific flight. Checking where an aircraft is coming from. Identifying the plane overhead.

But the free version has limitations. After 30 minutes, your session times out and you have to refresh. Ads appear throughout the interface. Historical data is limited to the past week. Aircraft details are basic. Flight alerts are capped at 5.

The paid subscriptions remove these restrictions and add features that range from genuinely useful to aviation-nerd-only.

Silver subscription ($1.49/month or $17.88/year):

Removes ads. Eliminates 30-minute session timeout. Extends flight history to 90 days. Allows up to 100 flight alerts. Shows more aircraft details including registration number and serial number. Adds weather overlays and aeronautical charts.

This is the tier most regular users need. If you track flights frequently—checking your own flights, following family members, identifying aircraft overhead—Silver provides everything useful without overwhelming you with data.

Gold subscription ($3.49/month or $41.88/year):

Includes everything in Silver plus one year of historical flight data instead of 90 days. Adds more detailed aircraft information including photos from multiple angles. Enhanced weather layers. Extended playback features. More filter options.

Gold is for aviation enthusiasts who want deep historical data. If you’re researching an aircraft’s routing patterns, tracking fleet movements, or just really into aviation data, Gold makes sense. For casual users, it’s overkill.

Business subscription ($49.99/month):

Includes everything in Gold plus three years of historical data instead of one. Professional weather overlays including turbulence, icing, winds, lightning strikes. AIRMETs and SIGMETs (weather warnings pilots use). Airport view showing real-time arrival/departure boards. Fleet view for tracking multiple aircraft. “Aircraft on ground” feature showing which planes are parked at specific airports over the past 90 days.

Business is designed for aviation professionals: airlines, airports, analysts, journalists. Unless you’re using Flightradar24 for work, it’s not worth the cost.

All subscriptions work across web and mobile with the same login. You get a 7-day free trial to test features before paying.

Is any of this worth your money?

For most people: no.

The free version does what matters. You can track your own flights. Follow aircraft carrying family or friends. Check if inbound planes are delayed. Identify what’s flying overhead. See real-time airspace closures during major events.

That covers 95% of use cases for regular passengers.

If you track flights very frequently—multiple times per week—and get annoyed by ads and session timeouts, Silver at $1.49/month might be worth it. That’s less than a coffee. If it saves you the frustration of refreshing the page every 30 minutes, it pays for itself.

Gold and Business are for enthusiasts and professionals. Unless you need historical data for research, detailed aircraft information for fleet tracking, or professional weather overlays for flight planning, these tiers offer nothing you’ll actually use.

The honest assessment: Flightradar24 is incredibly valuable as a free service. Paying makes it slightly more convenient and adds capabilities that matter to a small subset of users. Most people should stick with free.

What makes it genuinely useful

Beyond the novelty of watching planes move on a map, Flightradar24 solves real problems.

You’re waiting at an airport and your flight is delayed. The airline app says “delayed” but not why or by how much. Flightradar24 shows you the inbound aircraft is still 400 miles away. Now you know you’re not boarding for at least another hour. You can get food, find a quiet corner, and relax instead of hovering near the gate.

Your family member is flying and you want to know when to leave for airport pickup. Track their flight in real-time. See current position, estimated arrival time accounting for headwinds or delays. Plan your departure accordingly.

You’re at home and hear an aircraft overhead. What is it? Open Flightradar24, tap the AR mode (available in the app), point your phone at the plane. The app identifies it: United 737 en route from Denver to Newark at 37,000 feet.

You’re following news about airspace closures or volcanic eruptions or geopolitical tensions. Flightradar24 shows you the actual impact in real-time. Which routes are being avoided. How airlines are rerouting. Where aircraft are deviating.

You’re an aviation enthusiast who wants to know which aircraft types serve your local airport. Filter by aircraft type, see what’s flying. Go to the airport with that information and know what to look for.

These aren’t earth-shattering use cases. They’re small conveniences that collectively make air travel slightly less opaque. And “slightly less opaque” is surprisingly valuable given how much time people spend in airports feeling powerless.

What doesn’t work so well

Flightradar24 tracks commercial aircraft extremely well. Private aviation is hit-or-miss.

Many private aircraft don’t use ADS-B or have requested that their data be blocked for privacy reasons. You won’t see most private jets, business aircraft, or helicopters. Military aircraft are almost entirely absent—they typically don’t broadcast ADS-B or have their data filtered from public display.

Some governments request that specific aircraft be blocked. Japan requested that their Air Force One be removed from tracking after security concerns in 2014. Many heads of state and government officials fly on aircraft that don’t appear on Flightradar24.

Coverage is excellent over Europe, North America, and developed parts of Asia. It’s patchy over Africa, South America, and remote regions. Satellite coverage helps but doesn’t fully solve this—satellites pick up signals from aircraft at altitude but miss low-flying planes.

The interface on mobile is cluttered. Opening the app shows thousands of aircraft icons. This looks impressive but becomes overwhelming quickly. Filtering helps but requires knowing what you’re looking for. The app assumes you’re either tracking a specific flight or generally interested in all aviation activity. There’s no middle ground for casual “what’s near me” browsing without drowning in data.

The playback feature—which lets you replay historical flights—is powerful but confusing to use the first time. The interface isn’t intuitive. You need to know which date you’re interested in, find the flight, and figure out how playback controls work. It’s worth learning if you use it regularly, but it’s not self-explanatory.

The competition

Flightradar24 isn’t the only flight tracker. FlightAware and Plane Finder are direct competitors with similar features and data sources.

FlightAware focuses more on travelers—flight status updates, gate change alerts, airport information. The interface is cleaner for tracking your own flights specifically. It’s less focused on the global view of all aircraft and more focused on “what’s happening with my trip.”

Plane Finder offers augmented reality aircraft identification like Flightradar24 and has a one-time purchase option instead of subscriptions. If you don’t want recurring payments, Plane Finder might be preferable.

ADS-B Exchange provides completely unfiltered flight data—no blocking for privacy or security. If you want to track aircraft that other services have removed, ADS-B Exchange is the place. But it’s decidedly aimed at researchers and hardcore enthusiasts, not regular users.

For most people, the choice between Flightradar24 and FlightAware comes down to whether you want the global map view (Flightradar24) or the personal flight tracking focus (FlightAware). Both are free for basic use. Both do the job.

Flightradar24 has the brand recognition and media presence. When something aviation-related happens in the news, Flightradar24 is what gets mentioned. That network effect matters.

The bits most people miss

Flightradar24 has features buried in menus that even regular users don’t know about.

“Airport Disruption Index” shows real-time delays at major airports. If you’re planning a trip and wondering whether Frankfurt is experiencing delays, check the index. It aggregates data from all tracked flights arriving and departing that airport.

“Santa Tracker” runs every Christmas Eve. Flightradar24 displays a simulated Santa Claus sleigh making deliveries worldwide, complete with real-time tracking and updates. It’s their version of NORAD Tracks Santa. Over 50,000 people follow it annually.

April Fools jokes are a tradition. In 2025, they “recreated” two Concorde flights—London to New York and Paris to New York—making thousands of people briefly think Concorde was flying again. The flights generated 1 million views and significant media attention before people realized it was a joke.

They maintain a database of 1.2 million aircraft worldwide with details like manufacturer, age, and serial number. If you’re curious about the history of a specific aircraft, search by registration number and see everywhere it’s flown.

You can set up custom alerts for specific flights, aircraft, or airports. Get notified when a particular plane departs, arrives, or flies near a specific location. This is genuinely useful for photographers who want to catch specific aircraft types at local airports.

The “Playback” feature lets you recreate major aviation events. Want to see exactly what happened during an emergency landing, volcanic eruption airspace closure, or major airline incident? Search the date, find relevant flights, watch the replay. Historical data extends back years for paid subscribers.

What it means for aviation

Flightradar24 has fundamentally changed how the public interacts with aviation.

Before real-time flight tracking was publicly accessible, aviation was opaque. Flights departed, flights arrived, and what happened in between was known only to airlines and air traffic control. Passengers had no visibility into why delays occurred, where aircraft were, or what was happening in the sky above them.

Now everyone can see. This transparency has forced airlines to be more accurate in their delay communications because passengers can verify claims. It’s given journalists tools to report on aviation incidents with actual data instead of speculation. It’s allowed the public to watch geopolitical events unfold through the lens of airspace closures and flight diversions.

The aviation industry initially resisted this transparency. Concerns about security, privacy, and competitive information being publicly visible. But ADS-B signals are unencrypted by design—they were never meant to be secret. Flightradar24 just made existing data accessible.

The pushback faded as the value became clear. Airlines now use Flightradar24 data. Airports reference it in operations. The service has become infrastructure that the industry relies on.

There’s something democratizing about this. Aviation used to be the domain of professionals. Now anyone with a smartphone can track aircraft in real-time, understand routing decisions, see weather impacts, and follow aviation events as they happen.

Whether that’s profound or just mildly interesting depends on how much you care about aviation. But it’s undeniably different from how things worked twenty years ago.

Should you use it?

If you fly even occasionally, yes.

Not because you need to track every flight you take. Because occasionally you’ll be sitting in an airport wondering when your delayed flight will actually board, and Flightradar24 will give you an answer when the airline can’t or won’t.

Or you’ll be curious what’s flying overhead and want to know.

Or you’ll be following news about an aviation incident and want to see real data instead of speculation.

Or you’ll be picking someone up from the airport and want to know whether to leave now or wait another hour.

These are small problems. Flightradar24 provides small solutions. The free version handles all of them perfectly well.

Should you pay? Probably not. But if you use it frequently and ads/timeouts annoy you, $1.49/month for Silver is cheap enough that the cost doesn’t matter.

The real value isn’t in the paid features. It’s in the existence of a free, publicly accessible service that lets anyone track aircraft in real-time. That didn’t exist until two Swedish aviation geeks decided to put receivers on a rooftop in Stockholm and see what happened.

What happened is they accidentally built essential aviation infrastructure that 4 million people use daily.

Not bad for a hobby project.

Do you check Flightradar24 before flights, or are you just learning it exists?

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You’re not at the gate. You won’t be for a while.

The average taxi-out time at a major US airport — that’s gate to runway, before the flight even begins — is over 23 minutes. At JFK, it’s 27 minutes. At Chicago O’Hare, it’s over 21. Shanghai Pudong tops the global list at around 26 minutes each way. At Newark, nearly 3% of flights in 2024 had taxi times exceeding one hour. Not flight time. Taxi time. One hour of driving around the airport in a 70-tonne aircraft with jet engines running.

Someone wrote to the Chicago Sun-Times recently to complain that their flight from Nashville to Chicago involved 80 minutes of taxi time on the ground at O’Hare. The flight itself was shorter.

This is a problem nobody in aviation talks about very seriously, which is remarkable given the scale of the waste involved.

What is actually happening during taxi

A modern jet engine is an extraordinarily efficient device when operating at cruising altitude at high thrust. It is a remarkably inefficient device when propelling a wide-body aircraft around an airport at 15 miles per hour.

During taxi, engines operate at approximately 7% of rated thrust. At this power setting, combustion is incomplete and inefficient. The engine is producing thrust it doesn’t need to produce, burning fuel at a rate poorly suited to the task, and generating emissions — hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter — that deposit directly into the breathing zone of airport workers, ground crews, and communities near major airports.

The numbers are significant. Studies estimate that taxiing accounts for up to 6% of total fuel consumption for short-haul single-aisle aircraft operating from congested airports. Globally, approximately 5 million tonnes of fuel are burned in taxi operations annually. One study found that stop-and-go taxi situations — the kind that happen when aircraft queue behind each other on busy taxiways — account for 18% of taxi fuel consumed, purely due to congestion dynamics.

The comparison is useful: the aviation industry has spent billions developing more efficient engines, more aerodynamic airframes, more precise flight planning to reduce cruise fuel burn by fractions of a percent. The same aircraft then sits on a taxiway for 25 minutes burning fuel at maximum inefficiency, and this is treated as a logistical inevitability rather than an engineering problem to solve.

Why it’s gotten worse

Taxi times have increased steadily over the past two decades. The reasons are several and compounding.

Airport capacity has struggled to keep pace with traffic growth. When airports expand — new runways, new terminals — construction temporarily reduces taxiway capacity. Chicago O’Hare’s O’Hare 21 expansion project cost $6 billion and took more than a decade. It involved converting the airport’s old intersecting “X” runway configuration into a modern parallel runway system.

Parallel runways are more efficient for takeoff and landing operations. They allow simultaneous independent approaches and departures. But they create a different problem on the ground: to reach a runway without crossing an active parallel runway, aircraft often have to “perimeter taxi” — loop around the entire terminal complex. A plane landing on the far outer runway at O’Hare can spend 20 to 30 minutes just reaching a terminal gate, traversing the full perimeter of an airport covering over 7,000 acres.

The runway layout that maximises airborne efficiency creates surface inefficiency. The two problems are in tension, and airports have generally prioritised the former.

Airline consolidation has concentrated enormous traffic volumes at specific hub airports. O’Hare functions as a dual hub for both United and American Airlines. At peak periods, the volume of simultaneous pushbacks from gates creates a traffic jam dynamic on taxiways that closely resembles a highway at rush hour. The aircraft that pushes back tenth in sequence will sit behind nine aircraft, all running engines, waiting for their turn to begin moving. Vikram Krishnan of consultancy Oliver Wyman described it as “death by a thousand cuts.”

Scheduling hasn’t helped. Competitive pressure drives airlines to schedule maximum traffic at peak hours — morning rush, evening rush — creating predictable congestion spikes at predictable times. The system doesn’t distribute demand, but rather concentrates it.

What the pilot is doing

From the cockpit, a long taxi is a specific kind of managed frustration.

There are real decisions to make. Clearances to obtain. Traffic to watch. Runway crossings that require explicit ATC permission regardless of what’s visible. Checklists to complete before a certain point. At a complex airport like O’Hare or JFK, the surface movement can involve several frequency changes, multiple holding points, and routing that bears little resemblance to the most direct path to the runway.

Meanwhile, the engines are running. The fuel state is declining. At typical taxi fuel burn rates for a narrowbody aircraft, a 25-minute taxi consumes 300 to 500 kilograms of fuel before the aircraft has covered a single nautical mile of the planned route.

One mitigation available to pilots is single-engine taxi: shut down one engine on a twin, reduce fuel burn by something approaching 37% compared to two-engine taxi. This is standard practice at many airlines during long taxi situations. It has limitations — brake system hydraulics on some aircraft require engine bleed air, engine restart requires time and APU power — but where applicable it’s a meaningful improvement.

It is not, however, a solution. It’s an adaptation to a problem that shouldn’t exist.

The gate-hold that nobody does

There’s a known, well-studied approach to reducing taxi times and fuel burn: departure metering, or gate-holding.

The principle is straightforward. Instead of pushing back and joining a queue of aircraft on the taxiway — all running engines, all burning fuel, all waiting — an aircraft holds at the gate with engines off until the taxiway is clear enough for an uninterrupted taxi. Transfer the waiting time from the taxiway to the gate.

Research found that gate-holding for up to 25 minutes to reduce congestion could reduce fuel burn and emissions from taxi operations by 35 to 38% relative to unmanaged operations. The maths is simple: engines off at a gate beat engines on in a queue.

This works. There is good evidence it works. Some airports implement versions of it. Most don’t, or implement it inconsistently.

The reasons are partly operational and partly commercial. Slot constraints and airline scheduling create competitive pressure to push back on time, regardless of what’s waiting on the taxiway. Airlines that hold at the gate risk missing departure slot priority. ATC systems that could facilitate metering require coordination infrastructure that isn’t universally in place. And the airline that decides to hold at the gate unilaterally gains fuel savings but potentially loses slot position to competitors who push back immediately.

It is a collective action problem. The solution is known. The incentives don’t quite align to implement it consistently.

The technology that’s almost certified

There is a more fundamental solution: don’t use the main engines for taxi at all.

An aircraft taxi operation uses enormous jet engines to propel an aircraft at speeds a golf cart could match. The mismatch between the tool and the task is obvious. Electric motors — smaller, more efficient, drawing power from the aircraft’s Auxiliary Power Unit — could do the same job without the fuel burn, noise, or emissions.

Several systems have been developed to do this.

WheelTug fits electric motors into an aircraft’s front wheel assembly. The pilot controls the aircraft from the cockpit using normal controls, powered by the APU, without running the main engines. The company claims savings of over $1 million per aircraft per year and has signed up 26 airlines covering thousands of aircraft. As of 2026, they are working through FAA and EASA certification.

TaxiBot is a semi-autonomous electric tug controlled by the pilot from the cockpit. It is already certified and operational at a small number of airports. The pilot steers from the cockpit, main engines stay off until the aircraft is positioned near the runway. Studies show 50 to 85% fuel reduction during taxi, up to 90% CO2 reduction.

The Electric Green Taxiing System, a joint project between Honeywell and Safran, was developed for the A320 and 737 families, completed successful ground tests, and was discontinued in 2016. The reasons were primarily economic — high up-front cost, uncertain airline adoption — rather than technical. The system worked.

This is the consistent pattern in electric taxiing: technology that demonstrably functions, economic and certification barriers that delay or prevent deployment, and meanwhile thousands of aircraft burning millions of tonnes of fuel operating at 7% thrust through airport surface networks.

What O’Hare specifically illustrates

O’Hare is a useful case study not because it’s the worst globally — Shanghai Pudong’s average taxi times exceed it — but because it illustrates how infrastructure investment and operational efficiency can pull in opposite directions.

The O’Hare 21 project was one of the most ambitious airport infrastructure programs in US aviation history. $6 billion. More than a decade. The outcome is an airport with significantly increased runway capacity that also requires aircraft to taxi much further to use that capacity.

A flight arriving on the outer parallel runway faces a route that takes it around the entire terminal complex. Parallel runways need spacing to be genuinely independent, so they’re necessarily further from the terminals. Getting from the far runway to a gate means navigating a perimeter route past the ends of multiple runways, each requiring clearance to cross.

The runway configuration that allows more simultaneous takeoffs and landings generates the taxi times that make someone’s Nashville-to-Chicago flight shorter than their time on the ground afterward.

The answer to whether this is a good trade-off depends who you ask. Airlines care primarily about throughput — operations per hour. The parallel configuration delivers this. Passengers care about total journey time. Fuel burn and emissions are costs borne by airlines and the atmosphere, not by the airport itself.

The incentives are misaligned. They usually are.

Why it will probably stay broken

The taxiing problem has been documented, studied, and quantified for at least two decades. The solutions are known and technically viable. Progress has been slow.

Electric taxiing systems have been in development since the early 2010s. WheelTug has been approaching certification for years. Departure metering is implemented in some places and not others. Airlines use single-engine taxi where operationally acceptable. The aggregate improvement is real but marginal.

The structural reasons for slow progress are familiar: capital intensity, certification requirements, collective action problems, and a cost structure that doesn’t fully assign taxi fuel costs to the parties best positioned to reduce them.

The environmental costs are distributed across everyone. The benefits of change are captured narrowly by individual airlines. Certification is long and expensive. And the problem is invisible to most passengers, who experience it as a mild irritation rather than a systematic waste that aggregates to millions of tonnes of fuel annually.

Airlines have extended published block times — the scheduled gate-to-gate duration — to absorb typical taxi delays. This means your flight can “arrive on time” despite a 30-minute taxi, because the schedule was padded to account for it. The delay is hidden. The fuel burn continues.

In 2024, US aircraft collectively spent well over 150 million minutes taxiing. That number has been growing. The next time you watch the airport slide past your window for the thirtieth minute after landing, consider that somewhere in the global queue, thousands of aircraft are doing the same thing simultaneously.

All of them burning fuel. All of them going nowhere.

What’s the longest taxi you’ve sat through — and did anyone explain why?

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Two minutes eighteen seconds is actually a long eclipse. Most totalities are shorter. The geometry of the Earth, Moon, and Sun rarely aligns for longer than that. The Moon’s shadow races across the Earth’s surface at roughly 1,500 miles per hour, and any fixed point on the ground gets only a brief window before the shadow passes on to ruin someone else’s afternoon.

In June 1973, seven scientists experienced seventy-four minutes of continuous totality. They did it by being in the only vehicle on Earth capable of keeping up with the shadow, in an aircraft with holes cut in its fuselage, watching the Sahara pass below at twice the speed of sound while astronomers peered at the corona through improvised portholes and one of them searched — with total seriousness — for a planet that does not exist.

The record has never been broken. It probably won’t be. The vehicle that set it no longer exists.

The geometry problem

A total solar eclipse is an extraordinary coincidence of scales. The Sun is about 400 times larger than the Moon and happens to be about 400 times further away, which means both discs appear almost exactly the same size from Earth’s surface. This alignment is unique in our solar system. No other planet’s moon produces a perfect total eclipse. We happen to live on the one that does, which is either a remarkable cosmic accident or the universe showing off.

The Moon’s shadow on Earth is small — the zone of totality is rarely wider than a few hundred kilometres — and it moves quickly. At 1,500 miles per hour, it sweeps across any given point in minutes, often less. Two minutes and eighteen seconds on August 12 is on the generous end.

For astronomers, this is a persistent frustration. The solar corona — the Sun’s outer atmosphere, normally invisible against its overwhelming brightness — becomes visible only during totality. Studying it requires time. Two minutes is barely enough to set up, observe, and conclude before the sky brightens again.

The obvious solution, if you are a French astrophysicist in 1972 and you have access to the world’s only supersonic passenger aircraft and absolutely no fear of what it might mean to put telescopes in it, is to fly along with the shadow.

The idea

Pierre Léna of the Paris Observatory began planning for the June 1973 eclipse in May 1972 — thirteen months before the event. In the world of eclipse planning, this is fast. In the world of “let’s modify a supersonic prototype,” it is barely enough time.

The eclipse in question was unusual. The path of totality would cross North Africa along the Tropic of Cancer, and from a fixed point on the ground, totality would last over seven minutes — exceptionally long. Léna’s insight was that this eclipse, with its favourable geometry, offered the best possible opportunity to do what no one had done: keep an aircraft inside the shadow long enough to conduct actual sustained science.

The aircraft he had in mind was Concorde. Not a scheduled service Concorde — Concorde had not yet entered commercial service. The vehicle available was Concorde 001, the first prototype, tail number F-WTSS, which had first flown in March 1969 and was by 1973 still being test-flown to develop the programme. This is relevant because it means the scientists would be riding an aircraft that was simultaneously one of the most advanced ever built and one that was still being figured out.

The proposition was, stripped of its diplomatic framing: could they borrow the world’s most sophisticated prototype airliner, modify it in several ways that would normally require extensive engineering review, and use it to conduct astronomy over the Sahara?

The answer, remarkably, was yes.

What they did to the aircraft

The modifications required were not subtle. Concorde 001 is a supersonic aircraft designed to maintain pressurisation at 55,000 feet while travelling at Mach 2. Its fuselage is a carefully engineered structure where every component has been considered for its effect on pressurisation, drag, structural integrity, and aerodynamic performance.

The scientists cut holes in it.

Specifically, portholes were carved into the fuselage to accommodate the telescope mounts and camera apertures the scientific team required. Passenger seats were stripped out to make room for equipment racks. The cabin — not yet fitted for commercial service in any case — was converted into a flying observatory with bolted-down instrument platforms and the specific, somewhat chaotic atmosphere of a scientific experiment being prepared in a very unusual venue.

Don Liebenberg, the physicist from Los Alamos National Laboratory who led the American contingent, spent January through April 1973 in Paris and Toulouse working with French engineers to build and install his instruments. The process involved significant improvisation. Mounting precision scientific equipment inside a Mach 2 aircraft through custom-cut portholes, in a way that would survive the aerodynamic and vibration environment of supersonic flight without interfering with the aircraft’s operation, was not a procedure that came with an established manual.

“It was a remarkable process, with many hands to support us,” Liebenberg said decades later, still apparently grateful that it worked.

The five experiments planned covered: solar corona observation, solar intensity periodicity, infrared coronal measurements, additional spectroscopic observation, and — this is the one — a search for Vulcan.

Vulcan was a hypothetical planet predicted in the nineteenth century by Urbain Le Verrier, the French mathematician who had also successfully predicted the existence of Neptune from perturbations in Uranus’s orbit. Le Verrier noted anomalies in Mercury’s orbital precession that he believed required an unobserved inner planet to explain. He named it Vulcan and astronomers spent decades looking for it during eclipses, when the Sun’s brightness was blocked enough to potentially reveal a small inner planet.

By 1973, general relativity had explained Mercury’s orbital precession perfectly well without requiring any additional planet. Vulcan had been definitively not found many times. The scientific consensus was clear. Liebenberg and colleagues included a Vulcan search in their experiment list anyway, presumably on the basis that they were already up there and it would be rude not to look.

It wasn’t there. This was consistent with all previous observations.

The logistics of chasing a shadow at Mach 2

Gran Canaria was chosen as the departure point for reasons that illuminate the operational reality of Concorde.

The eclipse path crossed North Africa. The obvious approach would be to depart from an African airport. However, most airports on the continent in 1973 had runways shorter than Concorde’s takeoff requirements. An aircraft designed to cross the Atlantic could not take off from most of the continent it was flying over. The Sahara, despite its considerable extent, offers limited aviation infrastructure.

Gran Canaria also provided something Africa’s interior could not: temperature. Concorde’s maximum takeoff weight is affected by ambient temperature — hot air is less dense, which reduces lift and performance, which requires either a longer runway or less fuel or both. The Canary Islands, in the Atlantic off the northwest African coast, are cooler than the Saharan interior. Cooler conditions meant more fuel. More fuel meant more time in the air.

The shadow would be moving at approximately 1,500 miles per hour. Concorde at cruise would be doing around 1,350 miles per hour. This is another critical distinction from how the flight is commonly described: Concorde was not chasing the eclipse. It was running slightly slower than the shadow, positioning itself so the shadow would overtake it as slowly as possible. The Moon’s umbra would wash over the aircraft, stay above it for as long as the speed differential allowed, and then pull ahead.

The difference between 1,500 and 1,350 miles per hour — 150 miles per hour — determined how long they had. Not enough to stay ahead. Enough to stay underneath for seventy-four minutes.

Planning the intercept required computing exactly where the shadow would be, when, and what heading and speed Concorde needed to be on to be in the right place. There was no GPS. The aircraft’s navigation was inertial — a system that tracks position by measuring acceleration from a known starting point, accumulating small errors over time. The pre-computation of the intercept was done in advance, the flight plan loaded, and the mission flown on the expectation that the maths was correct.

They ran test flights on May 17 and again on June 28 — the final rehearsal was two hours and thirty-six minutes, essentially practicing the entire operation without an eclipse. Not many scientific missions do a dress rehearsal.

The flight

At 10:08 AM GMT on June 30, 1973, the four Olympus 593 engines of Concorde 001 lit to full afterburner on the runway at Gran Canaria Airport. The aircraft was flown by André Turcat — Concorde’s chief test pilot, the man who had conducted the aircraft’s first flight in 1969, the person probably more responsible for understanding this aircraft’s behaviour than anyone else alive. For the eclipse mission, the most advanced airliner in the world was flown by its most experienced pilot, over the Sahara, for astronomy.

Concorde accelerated through Mach 1 over the Atlantic, then to Mach 2 — about 1,350 miles per hour — and climbed to 55,000 feet. At that altitude, the sky above is noticeably darker than at ground level. The atmosphere becomes thin enough that stars are faintly visible in daylight. The horizon, in all directions, shows the unmistakeable curve of the Earth’s surface. The Sahara below, from this height, loses its texture and becomes abstraction.

The shadow would arrive from behind. The aircraft was flying east-southeast, roughly following the Tropic of Cancer, when the lunar umbra caught up over Mauritania.

For the passengers — seven scientists, their instruments, and their portholes — totality began. The sun went dark. The corona appeared: the faint, structured outer atmosphere of the sun visible only in these circumstances, extending in streamers and loops around the blocked disc. Liebenberg’s image of the corona was projected onto a sheet of paper on the cabin floor — an indirect viewing method, protecting eyes while allowing observation of the eclipse’s progress. Scientists peered through their portholes with telescopes and cameras. The spectrographs recorded. The search for Vulcan found nothing, as expected.

The aircraft crossed Mali. Niger. Nigeria. The shadow, moving slightly faster, stayed above them. The instruments recorded. The scientists observed. The sun did not reappear.

Seventy-four minutes of continuous totality. Then a second period of seven minutes as the geometry briefly realigned. Then a third of twelve minutes.

Concorde 001 landed at Fort-Lamy in Chad — now N’Djamena — at the end of the longest total solar eclipse observation in recorded history. The aircraft had arrived at its planned interception point within one second of the scheduled time. In 1973. Without GPS. Using a flight plan computed in advance by people doing the mathematics by hand.

“At 74 minutes,” Liebenberg said fifty years later, “our group aboard the Concorde set a record for the amount of time spent in totality that has never been broken. It was an experience I will never forget.”

The results, honestly

The scientific output of the flight is, in the careful phrasing of aviation historians, somewhat limited relative to the spectacle of the mission.

The five experiments produced observations, but the technology of 1973 was not always equal to the opportunity. Analogue instruments, film cameras, manual data collection under considerable time pressure, and the vibration environment of Mach 2 flight combined to produce results that were real but incomplete. The solar intensity periodicity that Liebenberg had prioritised was not conclusively confirmed from this data alone. The Vulcan search confirmed, again, that Vulcan does not exist, which was already known. The corona observations contributed usefully to the scientific record without producing a landmark discovery.

The Aviationist, reviewing the mission five decades later, noted that “the flight itself overshadowed the research attempts” — which is a polite way of saying that the most remarkable thing about the 1973 Concorde eclipse flight turned out to be the 1973 Concorde eclipse flight, rather than what the instruments recorded during it.

This is not a criticism so much as an observation about how science works at the edge of what’s technically possible. The equipment was improvised, the installation was novel, the environment was extreme, and everyone involved was doing something nobody had done before. That the data was imperfect is perhaps inevitable. That the operation worked at all is the achievement.

Why the record still stands

Concorde entered commercial service in 1976 and was retired in 2003. The fleet of twenty aircraft that operated for twenty-seven years was grounded permanently following the Air France crash at Paris in 2000 and the subsequent economics of September 2001. No commercial supersonic passenger aircraft has flown since.

The Moon’s shadow still moves at 1,500 miles per hour. Chasing it requires an aircraft that can approach that speed. NASA flew two WB-57 jets along the path of the 2017 American eclipse and extended their combined observations to about seven and a half minutes — a real achievement, roughly three times the ground observation time, and nowhere near seventy-four.

The SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft, which could exceed Mach 3, was retired from regular service in 1998. A Mach 3 aircraft would actually overtake the shadow — at most latitudes, the SR-71 moved faster than the umbra — but it was never configured for eclipse observation, and it no longer exists in operational form.

Various supersonic aircraft are currently in development: Boom Overture, the NASA X-59, others. None are yet flying passengers. None have been modified to carry astronomical instruments through custom portholes. None are available for Sahara eclipse missions.

Seventy-four minutes remains the record because the only vehicle that could set it was retired, and nothing has replaced it for this specific and unusual purpose.

Two minutes and eighteen seconds

On August 12, within the path of totality, you will have two minutes and eighteen seconds. Inside that window, if the sky is clear, you will see the corona — the Sun’s outer atmosphere, visible only in these moments — and stars in the middle of the day, and the horizon glowing in a ring from the edge of the shadow, and the particular quality of light that people who have seen totality consistently describe as unlike anything else.

This is not a consolation prize. It is, for most people, a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The August 12 eclipse will cross Greenland and Iceland and Spain and end over the Mediterranean, and the people standing in its path will have two minutes and eighteen seconds of something genuinely rare.

Somewhere above them, in 1973, seven scientists sat in a stripped-out prototype with holes in its fuselage and watched the same sky stay dark for seventy-four minutes while André Turcat held Mach 2 over the Sahara and Don Liebenberg photographed a corona and failed to find a planet everyone already knew wasn’t there.

The record is safe. There’s nothing left to break it with.

Will you be in the path of totality on August 12 — and if not, is it worth travelling for?

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Chances are, you’ve witnessed someone attempting to join the Mile High Club. Or more accurately, you’ve witnessed someone attempting and failing to be discreet about attempting to join the Mile High Club, which is most of what actually happens.

The concept has been part of aviation folklore for decades. It shows up in movies, gets mentioned in jokes, appears on bucket lists. For something so widely discussed, though, most people have never seriously considered the practical questions: Is this actually illegal? What happens if you get caught? And perhaps most importantly—has anyone thought about the size of an economy lavatory lately?

Short answer: the Mile High Club sits at an interesting intersection: it’s simultaneously a cultural myth, a logistical nightmare, and a genuine legal risk.

Here’s what actually happens when fantasy meets reality at 35,000 feet (based on author’s research, not experience).

The legal question

Let’s start with the obvious: is this illegal?

Yes. Almost everywhere. But not for the reason most people think.

There’s no law specifically titled “Don’t Have Sex on Airplanes.” Instead, you’re dealing with public indecency laws that exist in nearly every jurisdiction, combined with the fact that aircraft cabins—including lavatories—are legally considered public spaces.

Close and lock the lavatory door, and you’re still in a public space as far as the law is concerned. This matters because public indecency laws apply.

The jurisdictional complexity is where it gets interesting. At cruising altitude, which country’s laws apply? The answer: potentially several at once.

Generally, the relevant jurisdictions include the country where the aircraft is registered (flag state), the airspace being overflown, the departure country, the destination country, and sometimes the nationality of the passengers involved.

For a flight from London to Ibiza on a UK-registered aircraft, you might be subject to UK law, Spanish law (upon landing), and the laws of any country whose airspace you cross. For a transatlantic flight, add in maritime law over international waters and the laws of whichever country the aircraft lands in.

Different countries take vastly different approaches to enforcement. The UK has prosecuted cases. Spain arrests passengers upon landing. The UAE and other Middle Eastern countries have particularly strict decency laws—getting caught on a flight to Dubai could result in jail time, deportation, and travel bans.

In 2011, the UK Civil Aviation Authority refused to recertify an air charter company specifically because it allowed passengers to have sex in flight. The regulator’s position: this violated aviation safety regulations regardless of whether the aircraft was chartered for that purpose.

What remains consistent: if you’re caught, consequences exist. They might be criminal charges, substantial fines, lifetime airline bans, or all three. The uncertainty about which jurisdiction will prosecute doesn’t mean you’re safe—it just means you won’t know the penalty until it’s too late.

What flight attendants actually see

Flight attendants know immediately when someone’s attempting this. The lavatory occupied sign, the timing, the fact that two people entered together—it’s not subtle.

One senior flight attendant explained: “In the old days, when airplane lavatories were much larger, it was a very common thing. Downsizing lavatories might be a reason we don’t see it that much anymore.”

Modern economy lavatories are deliberately tiny. Airlines have progressively shrunk them to fit more seats on the aircraft. The physics alone make this aspirational rather than practical for most people.

The crew’s response depends on context. How disruptive is it? Did other passengers complain? Is it happening in seats (much worse) versus the lavatory? Are children on board? Do the passengers cooperate when told to stop?

Minimum response: knock on the door, tell them to return to seats, note it in the flight report. Maximum response: police meet the aircraft on arrival, criminal investigation, lifetime airline ban.

Another flight attendant’s perspective: “We would just make fun of them in the galley and wonder how desperate they would have had to be to screw in a filthy airplane bathroom.”

Which brings us to the part nobody talks about.

The hygiene reality

Aircraft lavatories are not romantic spaces. They’re cramped, smell of chemicals and whatever the previous passenger left behind, and are cleaned once per flight cycle if you’re lucky.

The surfaces have been touched by hundreds of people. The floor is questionable at best. The entire environment is designed for functional efficiency, not intimacy. The space is roughly the size of a phone booth.

The fantasy version involves spontaneity and adventure. The reality involves trying not to touch anything while attempting to maneuver in a space where you can barely turn around.

Then there’s the walk back to your seats. Everyone on the plane saw two people enter the lavatory together. Everyone will see two people exit. The cabin crew definitely noticed. There’s zero possibility of discretion.

In the smartphone era, there’s also the risk of becoming viral entertainment. A 2023 EasyJet flight from Luton to Ibiza—cabin crew opened the lavatory door mid-act while passengers filmed on their phones. The video got five million views on social media. Police met the aircraft on arrival. Both passengers were banned from the airline.

The gap between aspiration and reality explains why most people who claim Mile High Club membership are probably lying.

The social history

The legend predates commercial aviation. The most commonly cited origin involves Lawrence Sperry, aviation pioneer and inventor of the autopilot system.

In November 1916, Sperry was flying a Curtiss Flying Boat over New York with socialite Dorothy Rice Sims. The aircraft crashed into Great South Bay. Both survived and were rescued by duck hunters. Both were naked.

Contemporary newspapers ran it under headlines like “Aerial Petting Ends in Wetting.” The reports confirmed physical intimacy but described it as “petting” rather than intercourse. The aircraft was flying at roughly 500 feet—well below the one-mile threshold that would later define the “club.”

An even earlier precedent exists from 1785, shortly after the first manned hot-air balloon flights. Members of a London gentlemen’s club placed wagers on whether Lord Derby would successfully have sex in a balloon during flight.

The term “Mile High Club” itself didn’t enter common usage until the 1960s and 1970s, coinciding with the jet age when commercial air travel became accessible beyond just the wealthy elite.

Richard Branson claimed he joined at age 19 (circa 1969) in an aircraft lavatory, later discovering his partner was married. This is one of the few verified celebrity claims, mostly because Branson has publicized it himself.

Most celebrity “membership” claims are unverified rumors. The mythology vastly exceeds the reality.

How common is this really

A 2021 survey found less than 5% of respondents admitted to attempting it, with even fewer claiming success.

This tracks with flight attendant accounts. It happens occasionally on long international overnight flights, but nowhere near as often as popular culture suggests.

The reputation outpaces the frequency by an order of magnitude. Most people claiming membership are lying. The few who aren’t are probably regretting it.

Why people still try

The appeal appears to be transgression rather than physical pleasure. It’s the thrill of doing something forbidden in a semi-public space, thousands of feet above the earth.

For some, it’s about checking a box on a bucket list, regardless of whether the experience lives up to expectations.

The problem is that “getting away with it” has become nearly impossible. Smaller lavatories, more vigilant crew, smartphone-wielding passengers, and stricter enforcement all work against success.

The risk calculation

What you’re risking:

• Criminal charges (severity varies by jurisdiction)

• Fines ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands depending on country

• Jail time in some jurisdictions

• Lifetime airline bans

• Arrest upon landing

• Public humiliation via social media

• Loss of employment (multiple documented cases)

• In strict jurisdictions: deportation and travel bans

What you’re getting in exchange:

• An uncomfortable encounter in a tiny, filthy lavatory

• A story you probably can’t tell without admitting to a crime

• An experience almost certainly worse than the fantasy

• Possible viral fame for all the wrong reasons

The few verified cases that resulted in prosecution show a consistent pattern: participants lose jobs, face charges, suffer reputational damage, and universally conclude it was a terrible mistake.

The bottom line

The Mile High Club is mostly mythology. It happens, but far less often than popular culture suggests. When it does happen, it’s uncomfortable, unhygienic, and obvious to everyone on the aircraft.

It’s illegal in most jurisdictions—aircraft cabins are public spaces, public indecency laws apply, and the fact that you’re at altitude doesn’t create some legal loophole. Prosecution varies by country, but the risk is real.

Airlines ban passengers for this. Aviation authorities investigate. Police meet aircraft on arrival. Flight attendants know immediately and aren’t impressed.

The hygiene reality is terrible. The cramped space makes the physics challenging. The legal risk is substantial. The walk of shame is inevitable. The smartphone in every passenger’s pocket means you might end up as viral entertainment.

And yet the mythology persists. People continue attempting it despite all evidence suggesting they shouldn’t.

My perspective as a lawyer: don’t. The criminal record, airline ban, and public humiliation aren’t worth it.

My perspective as a pilot: if you must engage in location-based bucket-list activities, pick literally anywhere else. An aircraft lavatory at 35,000 feet is among the worst possible choices—legally, practically, and hygienically.

The Mile High Club’s greatest achievement is the gap between its reputation and its reality. The legend is far more appealing than the actual experience could ever be.

Ever been on a flight where you suspected fellow passengers were attempting this, or does the entire concept seem as unappealing to you as it does to most flight attendants?

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She asked me afterward. I said: it depends entirely on which part of the question you’re asking.

Here is the pilot’s version of the stories that keep coming up at dinner tables and board meetings.

The passenger who actually landed the plane

In May 2022, Darren Harrison was in the back of a Cessna 208 Caravan, returning to Florida from a fishing trip in the Bahamas. He was wearing flip-flops. His wife was seven months pregnant. He had no flight experience whatsoever.

The pilot told his two passengers he wasn’t feeling well — headache, fuzzy, something wrong — and then slumped forward onto the controls. The aircraft went into a nosedive. Harrison climbed over three rows of seats to the cockpit, moved the pilot out of the way, grabbed the controls, and pulled the aircraft out of the dive. The plane had dropped 3,600 feet in sixteen seconds.

He then spent twenty minutes pressing the wrong buttons before he figured out how to work the radio. Once he did, he told air traffic control: “I’ve got a serious situation here. My pilot has gone incoherent. I have no idea how to fly the airplane.”

ATC controller Robert Morgan — a part-time flight instructor, which matters enormously — ran to help. A colleague printed out photos of the Cessna 208 cockpit from the internet. Morgan guided Harrison through descent, approach, and landing at Palm Beach International Airport using the printed cockpit diagram. Harrison landed centerline. Morgan called him “my best student ever.” Harrison then asked ATC how to stop the plane, which is when they told him about the toe brakes on the rudder pedals.

This is a completely real story. It is documented by the FAA, recorded by ATC, and covered by every major news outlet. It is also, and this is important, nothing like what happens in films about passenger landings, and almost nothing like what would happen if both pilots on your next commercial flight became incapacitated.

Why it worked — and what it was actually like

A Cessna 208 Caravan is a single-engine turboprop with a maximum takeoff weight of around 3,800 kilograms. It approaches at roughly 80 knots. It has dual controls by design. When the aircraft is in level flight, it wants to stay in level flight — it’s inherently stable. If you point it at a long flat runway on a calm day with a flight instructor on the radio and printed cockpit photos, and if you are genuinely calm and have enough common sense not to yank the controls (Harrison’s words: “I knew if I went up and yanked that, the airplane would stall”), landing is difficult but not impossible.

The conditions were close to optimal for this scenario. Daylight. Good visibility. Coastal Florida. A straight-in approach to a major international airport. An experienced flight instructor talking him through each step in real time. An aircraft that was already configured and flying reasonably normally once he’d leveled it from the dive.

None of this is a template for anything. It is an extraordinary alignment of circumstances that produced a good outcome. Morgan himself said afterward: “I knew the plane was flying like any other plane. I just had to keep him calm, point him to the runway, and tell him how to reduce the power.” That sentence contains the whole story. The plane was flying like any other plane. Point. Reduce power. Land.

Why none of this applies to the aircraft you normally fly on

The aircraft Harrison landed weighs 3,800 kilograms. A Boeing 737-800 weighs up to 79,000 kilograms at takeoff. It approaches at around 145 knots. The energy involved in landing that aircraft, and the precision of timing required in the flare — the moment you arrest the descent just before touchdown — is not something you can talk someone through using printed cockpit photos.

The 737 has two pilots for reasons that have nothing to do with redundancy in the event of incapacitation. The workload on approach and landing is actively divided between them. One flies, one monitors, one handles radio calls, both call checklists. The aircraft configuration sequence for approach — flaps in stages, gear down, speed management, autothrottle behaviour, FMC inputs — assumes two trained people doing their respective jobs simultaneously.

More practically: the approach speed. Harrison came in at roughly 80 knots. At that speed, if the timing of your flare is off by a second, the outcome is rough but probably survivable. At 145 knots, the timing tolerance is much smaller and the consequences of getting it wrong are much larger. This is why even experienced pilots transitioning from smaller aircraft to airliners do substantial simulator training on the specific handling characteristics of each type. The aircraft does not behave intuitively to someone who hasn’t flown it.

What would actually happen if both pilots were incapacitated

This question is genuinely more interesting than the landing question, and the answer is less reassuring than most people assume.

Modern commercial aircraft on autopilot will continue flying the programmed route until the fuel runs out. The autopilot doesn’t know that both pilots are incapacitated. It doesn’t know anything has changed. It will follow the flight plan, manage altitude and speed, and eventually, if nobody intervenes, run out of fuel somewhere over the programmed route.

ATC would notice relatively quickly that the aircraft has stopped responding to calls. Depending on the flight, they might try alternative radio frequencies, satellite communication, and datalink messages before declaring an emergency. Military aircraft might be scrambled to fly alongside and visually inspect the cockpit. None of this lands the plane.

Modern autoland systems — the category III ILS approach used at equipped airports in low visibility — can, in principle, fly an approach and land the aircraft without pilot input. But this requires specific aircraft certification, a specific airport certification, and specific conditions. It doesn’t switch on automatically because both pilots are unconscious. Someone needs to programme it. And even after a successful autoland, someone needs to apply the brakes, clear the runway, and stop the aircraft from rolling into something.

The reason this scenario — both pilots incapacitated simultaneously — is considered extremely unlikely is that it requires a simultaneous failure affecting two separate people, and airlines go to specific lengths to prevent exactly this. Pilots eat different meals on long-haul flights, the standard procedure being that the captain and first officer eat from different menus at different times, specifically so that food poisoning cannot incapacitate both simultaneously. This is the kind of thing that sounds paranoid until you understand why it became a procedure.

A few other things that come up at board meetings

Can you open the aircraft door in flight? No. The door on a pressurised commercial aircraft is held shut by the pressure differential between the cabin and the outside atmosphere. At cruise altitude, the force holding the door closed is several tonnes. The mechanism that opens it requires first releasing this pressure, which you cannot do from inside the cabin at altitude. This is not a matter of the door being locked; it is a matter of physics. Several passengers have tried, for various reasons, and none have succeeded.

Do pilots eat different meals? Yes, as described above, on long-haul flights. This is standard operating procedure and not the airline being thoughtful about offering menu variety.

Do mobile phones interfere with aircraft systems? No documented incident has ever been attributed to mobile phone interference with flight systems. The rules persist partly because the risk was never completely characterised in every possible electromagnetic environment, and partly because enforcing “turn off your phone” consistently is easier than explaining the nuance to 200 passengers every departure. It’s also considerably easier to focus on the safety briefing if the cabin is quiet, which is an underappreciated secondary benefit.

What actually worries pilots

For what it’s worth: the passenger-lands-the-plane scenario is not something pilots spend significant mental energy on, because the confluence of conditions required for it to be either necessary or possible is narrow. Darren Harrison’s situation required a single-pilot aircraft, a fully incapacitated pilot with no ability to continue flying, a second passenger able and willing to take control, an experienced flight instructor available on ATC, good weather, a major airport on the coast, and a calm person in flip-flops who happened to have good instincts. Any one of those factors being different produces a different outcome.

What the industry thinks about is more mundane: weather, mechanical reliability, fatigue management, communication, and the slow accumulation of small errors that occasionally compound into large problems. None of these make for a good board meeting story. Darren Harrison does.

The pilot made it, incidentally. Aortic dissection, survived surgery, fully recovered. He’s back flying. His first flight after recovery, he took his surgeon.

Is there an aviation story you’ve heard that you’re not sure whether to believe? Leave it in the comments and I’ll tell you which category it falls into.

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No drama. No announcement. They just don’t go.

New jumpers find this confusing the first time they see it. The wind doesn’t look that bad. The clouds seem fine. That guy has two thousand jumps — why is he standing down on a day that looks completely jumpable?

The honest answer is usually some combination of things that are hard to put into a sentence, which is exactly why so few people talk about it directly. But it’s worth trying, because the instinct to back out is one of the more important skills in this sport, and it’s almost never taught explicitly.

What backing out actually looks like

It rarely looks like fear, because by the time someone has a few thousand jumps, fear in the conventional sense has mostly been replaced by something quieter and more specific: a developed sense for when something is slightly off.

It looks like someone watching the spot on the previous load drift further than expected and deciding the upper winds aren’t what was briefed. It looks like someone noticing their own focus isn’t where it needs to be — distracted by something from work, or a bad night’s sleep, or an argument that morning — and deciding that today isn’t the day to fly a new exit or push a personal limit. It looks like someone glancing at a piece of their own gear during the gear check, noticing something that’s probably fine, and deciding “probably fine” isn’t the standard they’re willing to accept today.

It looks, most often, like someone simply saying “I’m going to sit this one out” and walking to get a coffee, with no further explanation offered or expected.

The jumpers who do this well don’t make it a performance. They don’t announce their reasoning to the manifest desk. They don’t seek validation. They just remove themselves from the load and let everyone else get on with their day. The absence of drama is itself part of the skill — backing out loudly, with lots of explanation, starts to look like something else: seeking reassurance, or building a case, or performing caution for an audience. The experienced version is quiet. It doesn’t need witnesses.

Reading conditions, reading people, reading yourself

There are three separate things being evaluated when someone backs out, and they get conflated constantly by people newer to the sport.

Reading conditions is the most visible one and the easiest to learn, eventually. Cloud base, wind at altitude versus wind on the ground, the quality of light in late afternoon, whether the wind has been building steadily through the day in a way the forecast didn’t fully capture. This is learnable. It takes time and repetition, but it’s a skill in the conventional sense — you get better at it the more situations you’ve seen.

Reading people is less discussed but equally important. A formation load is only as good as its weakest read on the exit. An experienced jumper evaluating whether to get on a load with an unfamiliar group is partly evaluating the conditions and partly evaluating whether the other five or seven people on that formation are jumpers whose judgment, currency, and skill they trust enough to share a door with at altitude. This isn’t snobbery. It’s risk assessment. A jumper who hasn’t flown in three months, or who’s clearly nervous in the briefing, or who’s pushing for a formation slightly above what their experience supports, changes the risk profile of the whole jump for everyone on it.

Reading yourself is the hardest of the three and the one people are worst at, because it requires honesty about your own state that most people aren’t naturally inclined toward. Am I actually focused right now, or am I going through the motions because I drove here and feel like I should jump? Is my currency where it needs to be for what I’m about to attempt, or have I been away longer than I’m admitting to myself? Did that minor ankle thing from last weekend actually heal, or am I hoping it did because I don’t want to sit out another weekend?

The jumpers who back out well are usually the ones who’ve gotten reasonably honest with this third category. It’s also the category most likely to get worse, not better, with experience — because experience builds confidence, and confidence is exactly what erodes the honest self-assessment that backing out requires.

“I drove all this way” is not a reason to jump

This is probably the single most dangerous sentence in the sport, and it’s said, out loud or silently, more often than almost anything else that precedes a bad outcome.

The logic of sunk cost works on skydivers exactly the way it works on everyone else, which is to say it works very well and very badly at the same time. You drove two hours. You took the day off work. You’ve been looking forward to this all week. The conditions are marginal, your gut says hold, and none of that changes the fact that you’re already here, kitted up, and it feels like a waste to not jump.

None of that — the drive, the day off, the anticipation — has any bearing on whether the jump is a good idea. The aircraft doesn’t care how long your commute was. The wind at altitude doesn’t soften because you took annual leave. But the psychological pull is real and it is strong, and it gets stronger the more invested you are in the day going a certain way.

The discipline required to recognize “I drove all this way” as an emotional argument rather than a safety argument, and to set it aside accordingly, is not something that comes naturally. It has to be deliberately practiced, ideally talked about openly enough in your jumping community that it becomes a known pattern people can call out in themselves and each other without it being awkward.

The peer pressure problem nobody likes admitting exists

Dropzones are social environments built around shared risk and mutual trust, which is wonderful for community and occasionally terrible for honest decision-making.

When five people are committed to a formation and a sixth is wavering, there is real pressure — almost never stated outright, almost always felt — to not be the person who breaks up the load. Nobody says “get on the plane or we’ll think less of you.” Nobody needs to. The social cost of being the person who backed out and inconvenienced five other people’s planned jump is felt without being spoken, and it is a genuinely difficult thing to push back against, especially for newer jumpers who haven’t yet built up enough standing in the community to back out without worrying what it signals.

This pressure runs in both directions of experience, which is part of what makes it insidious. A newer jumper might feel pressure from a more experienced one who’s eager to fly a particular jump and has no patience for hesitation. An experienced jumper might feel a different pressure — the quiet expectation that someone with their jump numbers shouldn’t be backing out of conditions that less experienced people are happily jumping in, which is exactly backwards but feels real in the moment anyway.

The dropzones with the healthiest culture around this are the ones where backing out carries genuinely zero social cost — where nobody bats an eye, the load reshuffles, and the conversation moves on within thirty seconds. This culture has to be actively built and maintained. It does not happen automatically just because everyone involved is, individually, a reasonable and safety-conscious person. Groups behave differently than individuals, and the group dynamic around a fully kitted, ready-to-board load has its own momentum that works against anyone trying to step off it.

How to back out without it looking like fear

The honest answer is that it eventually doesn’t matter how it looks, because the people whose opinion is worth caring about will respect the decision regardless, and the people who wouldn’t respect it are not the people you should be calibrating your safety decisions around in the first place. But that’s a conclusion you arrive at with experience, not a starting point that helps anyone in the moment.

In the meantime, a few things genuinely do help.

State it plainly and briefly, without over-justifying. “Not feeling it today” or “going to sit this one out” said once, calmly, and then moving on, reads completely differently from a long explanation that sounds like you’re building a legal defense for your own decision. Over-explaining signals insecurity about the choice. Stating it plainly signals that the choice was already made and doesn’t require anyone’s approval.

Don’t wait until the last possible moment. Backing out while everyone’s already at the aircraft door creates a logistical problem and makes the decision look reactive and panicked, even when it isn’t. Backing out earlier — at gear-up, or even before that, while the load is still being organized — gives the impression of a decision made calmly with the information available, which is usually exactly what it was.

Make it normal by doing it before you need to dramatically. Jumpers who occasionally sit out a load on conditions other people are jumping, even when those conditions are genuinely fine, build a reputation for being someone who thinks for themselves rather than someone reacting to a specific scare. This sounds counterintuitive, but it works: if backing out is something you do periodically as a matter of standard practice, nobody reads any particular instance of it as a sign that something’s specifically wrong with you, your nerve, or your skill.

And accept, honestly, that some people will read it as fear or weakness regardless of how well you handle it, and that this is a cost worth paying. The number of people whose respect is worth sacrificing your own judgment for is zero.

Why the best jumpers sometimes jump the least

There’s a pattern, visible at most dropzones if you watch long enough, where the jumpers with the most consistently good judgment are not the ones with the highest jump numbers for the season. They’re not chasing every load. They’re not jumping in every condition the aircraft is willing to fly in. They jump less, in aggregate, than several jumpers with worse judgment who say yes to everything.

This isn’t a coincidence and it isn’t really a paradox, once you think about it properly. The same internal calibration that produces good in-air decision-making — knowing your limits, reading conditions honestly, not pushing past what the day or your own state actually supports — produces fewer total jumps over a season, because that calibration says no more often than the alternative.

It’s tempting to think of jump numbers as a pure measure of commitment to the sport, and in some sense they are. But total jump count is also, partly, a measure of how often someone said yes to a load regardless of whether they should have. The jumper with eight hundred jumps in a season who said yes to everything is not necessarily safer or more skilled than the jumper with three hundred who said no whenever something felt slightly wrong. They might just be luckier, so far.

This is genuinely hard to see from outside the sport, and honestly hard to fully internalize from inside it too, because the culture — reasonably, in most respects — celebrates high jump numbers as a sign of dedication and progression. Nobody throws a party for the season you backed out of fourteen loads. But the fourteen loads you backed out of might be the actual reason you’re still jumping at all.

The skill nobody puts on a logbook

None of this shows up anywhere official. There’s no certification for “appropriately cautious self-assessment.” No rating bumps your status for the number of times you backed out of a marginal load. The entire skill lives in a category the sport doesn’t formally measure, which is probably part of why it’s underdeveloped in a lot of otherwise very experienced jumpers.

But it’s there in the people who’ve been doing this safely for decades, almost always, in some form. They’ve simply gotten quietly comfortable with a sentence that newer jumpers find surprisingly hard to say out loud: not today.

Nobody needs more reasoning than that. It’s usually the correct amount.

Have you ever backed out of a load and second-guessed the decision afterward — or backed out and immediately felt relieved? What made the difference?

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NOTAMs are bulletins issued by aviation authorities alerting pilots to anything that might affect flight operations: runway closures, navigation aid failures, temporary airspace restrictions, construction work, broken lights, disabled aircraft, you name it. If something changes at an airport or along a route, there’s supposed to be a NOTAM about it.

The idea is simple: essential information, delivered quickly, to keep pilots informed and flights safe.

The reality is a 100-page printout of unreadable garbage where the one critical piece of information you actually need—say, the runway being closed for maintenance—is buried somewhere between warnings about North Korean missile tests over the Sea of Japan (for a flight in Wales), peak goat-grazing times near an airport in Morocco, and a lengthy explanation that Turkey does not accept Greece’s definition of search and rescue boundaries in the Aegean and will provide no further explanation to any objection raised.

The system was designed in 1924. The format hasn’t changed since. And pilots universally hate it.

This isn’t a minor annoyance. It’s a genuine safety problem disguised as a bureaucratic one.

The format nobody can read

NOTAMs use a proprietary coding system that makes them nearly impossible to read without a decoder ring and considerable patience. Everything is in UPPERCASE. Abbreviations are mandatory. Locations are referenced by four-letter ICAO codes. Times are in UTC expressed in a YYMMDDHHMM format that looks like someone smashed their keyboard.

Here’s a real example:

ORD 06/001 ORD RWY 04L/22R CLSD 2106011200-2106301200

Translation: Chicago O’Hare’s runway 04L/22R is closed from June 1 through June 30, 2021, starting at noon UTC.

That one’s relatively simple. It tells you what you need to know if you can crack the code. Now try this:

LTBB/ISTANBUL/SEHIR-CITY A2999/16 11JUL 0414Z – NAVIGATIONAL WARNING TO ALL CONCERNED: THIS NOTAM IS ISSUED TO CLARIFY THE A1490/16 LGGG NOTAM ISSUED BY GREEK CAA. AS REGARDS THE GREEK NOTAM A1490/16, TURKEY DOES NOT ACCEPT THE DEFINITION OF THE SEARCH AND RESCUE (SAR) AREA WITH REFERENCE TO ATHENS FIR. THE AREA REFERRED TO IN THE SAID GREEK NOTAM FALLS WITHIN TURKEY'S MARITIME SEARCH AND RESCUE REGION (SRR) AS DECLARED TO THE IMO AND INCLUDED IN THE IMO'S GLOBAL SAR PLAN. THEREFORE, ALL SAR EFFORTS/ACTIVITIES WITHIN THE TURKISH SRR MUST BE COORDINATED WITH THE RELEVANT TURKISH AUTHORITIES. TURKEY ALSO WOULD LIKE TO EMPHASIZE THAT NO FURTHER EXPLANATION WILL BE GIVEN TO ANY OBJECTION RAISED TO TURKISH NOTAM A3009/16.

That’s Turkey and Greece arguing via NOTAM about who controls search and rescue operations in the Aegean. This isn’t a one-time occurrence. It goes on for years. Pilots flying through the region get pages of this geopolitical dispute mixed in with actual operational information.

Greece responds with its own NOTAM rejecting Turkey’s position. Turkey responds to that. Round and round it goes. If you’re trying to find out whether the ILS at Athens is working, good luck finding it buried in the diplomatic warfare.

One pilot’s suggestion for improvement: “Personally I think taxiway and apron closure NOTAMs are too readable. I think they should be distributed in RADIAL/DME format, or perhaps raw Lat-Lon. Additionally, time should be specified in seconds since the founding of the FAA.”

The format problem is real, but it’s not the worst part.

Everything is relevant, therefore nothing is

The bigger issue isn’t readability—it’s relevance. Or rather, the complete and utter lack of it.

Planning a short VFR flight along the English coast at 2,000 feet? Your briefing will include warnings about Libya, Ukraine, Sinai, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. Why? Because the filtering system considers these “relevant” to any flight departing from UK airspace, regardless of where you’re actually going or how high you’re flying.

Flying Newark to Washington DC in a regional jet? You’ll get NOTAMs about North Atlantic Tracks—routing procedures used by airliners crossing the ocean at 35,000 feet. As one pilot put it: “I fucking love doing a flight from Newark to DC and getting NOTAMs about the North Atlantic Tracks. Motherfucker, if I end up on the tracks during that leg in a 145, the NOTAMs are the least of my damn problems.”

Planning a flight from Switzerland to Austria in a Cessna 172 at 8,000 feet? Enjoy five pages about COVID-19 entry requirements for arrivals from China, hazardous situations in Yangon, Myanmar, and restrictions above FL300 that have absolutely nothing to do with your flight.

The system doesn’t filter by altitude, destination, aircraft type, or common sense. It just dumps everything that might theoretically be relevant based on geographic coordinates and calls it a day.

One pilot described checking NOTAMs for a 99-nautical-mile flight in Wales: got warnings about North Korean missile tests over the Sea of Japan, but nothing about the aircraft carrier anchored near his route. The carrier wasn’t NOTAMed. The missiles 5,000 miles away were.

The greatest hits

Here are some real NOTAMs that pilots have encountered:

Curaçao (TNCC): BIRD BATH CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE

Context: A “bird bath” is aviation jargon for a specific type of ground equipment used in aircraft maintenance. But without explanation, this reads like the airport is genuinely concerned about where local pigeons will bathe. Multiple pilots reported this one made them laugh, then wonder what a bird bath actually was, then forget to check whether the ILS was working.

Teterboro Airport, New Jersey, has been running these for years:

TEB 01/007 TEB AD AP WILDLIFE HAZARD DEER

TEB 01/005 TEB AD AP WILDLIFE HAZARD FOX

TEB 01/006 TEB AD AP WILDLIFE HAZARD COYOTE

Pilots based at Teterboro joke about these constantly. Not one pilot has ever reported seeing any of these animals. The NOTAMs remain active anyway. Legal liability covered, usefulness nonexistent.

Morocco (GMMB): SLAUGHTER BOARS OPERATION BY NIGHT WITHIN THE AIRPORT

I have so many questions. Are they slaughtering boars that somehow got onto the airport? Is this a regular occurrence? Why only at night? Is this a wildlife control measure or a completely different kind of operation? The NOTAM doesn’t say. It just warns you that boar slaughter is happening and you should probably be aware of it.

Benin-Togo airspace: RISK OF PERTURBATION IN BENIN-TOGO AIRSPACE DUE TO COTONOU APPROACH DEPORTED FREQUENCY VHF 125.9 MHZ WITHDRAWN FOR MAINTENANCE

“Risk of perturbation” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Also “deported frequency” is not a thing. They probably meant something else. Good luck figuring out what.

When the joke stops being funny

The comedy would be harmless if NOTAMs weren’t supposed to be critical safety information that pilots are legally required to review before every flight.

But here’s the problem: when you bury pilots in 100 pages of irrelevant garbage, they stop reading carefully. Their eyes glaze over. They start skimming. And then they miss the one NOTAM that actually matters—the one that could save their life or cost them their license.

Pilots regularly report getting detailed NOTAMs about:

• Missing light bulbs on radio towers 20 miles from their route, under 400 feet AGL

• Solar panel farms near Las Vegas (appears in every flight plan for the region regardless of your actual destination or altitude)

• Parachute drop zones NOTAMed as active 24/7/365 regardless of whether anyone is actually jumping

But they struggle to get reliable information about:

• Temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) that will get them in serious trouble if violated

• Actual runway closures (airports NOTAM runways closed that turn out to be open when you arrive, or fail to NOTAM closures that are real)

• Navigation aids giving false readings

One pilot’s experience at Dallas Love Field: “One of the PAPIs was out for three days before they NOTAMed it out of service. Delta landing in front of me asked tower about it. Tower said they showed it on and asked me. I said, ‘Uh… It’s been out for several days. I thought y’all knew?’ Finally got NOTAMed on day four.”

Another pilot: “My favorite: Surprise runway closures for routine runway inspections. No NOTAM. Just show up and find out the runway’s closed.”

The system that’s supposed to keep pilots informed is actively making flights less safe by drowning critical information in noise.

One million NOTAMs and counting

In 2006, aviation authorities worldwide issued 500,000 NOTAMs.

By 2013, that number hit 1 million.

Why? Are there twice as many airports in the world? Twice as many actual changes to report? Twice as many navigation aids failing?

No. It’s legal ass-covering at scale.

Every aviation authority wants to make sure that if something goes wrong—if a pilot violates airspace, hits an obstacle, lands on a closed runway—they can point to a NOTAM and say “we warned them.” Doesn’t matter if that warning was buried on page 87 between a bird hazard advisory and a diplomatic dispute about FIR boundaries. It was there. The pilot should have read it.

The problem is that when everything is flagged as critical, nothing actually is. When pilots are expected to read and comprehend 100 pages of largely irrelevant information before a one-hour flight, they rationally start making decisions about what to skip. And sometimes they skip the wrong thing.

The response from aviation authorities isn’t to fix the filtering or improve the system. It’s to issue more NOTAMs reminding pilots that they’re required to read all the NOTAMs. The irony is apparently lost on everyone involved.

Why this hasn’t been fixed

The NOTAM system was invented in 1924. It originally used 5-bit ITA2 encoding because that’s what telegraphs used. The rest of the world moved to ASCII in 1963, bringing uppercase and lowercase letters that every keyboard now supports. Aviation didn’t follow. We’re still using a format designed for technology that’s been obsolete for over 60 years.

There have been efforts to fix it. The website fixingnotams.org was launched in 2019 by a group of frustrated pilots and dispatchers. The FAA announced it would transition from its proprietary domestic format to the ICAO international format. Various advocacy groups have pushed for smart filtering that only shows NOTAMs actually relevant to your specific flight.

Some progress has been made. Modern flight planning software attempts to filter NOTAMs by route, altitude, and time. Some systems let you toggle categories on and off. EFBs (electronic flight bags) display NOTAMs in more readable formats with proper capitalization and expanded abbreviations.

But the fundamental problem remains: the system serves too many purposes and too many masters. It’s designed to cover legal liability first, communicate useful information second. As long as aviation authorities can point to a NOTAM and say “we told you,” there’s no real incentive to make the system actually usable.

The people issuing NOTAMs aren’t the ones reading them. The people reading them have no control over what gets issued. And everyone in between is just trying to cover their ass.

What pilots actually do

I check NOTAMs before every flight because it’s required by regulation and because occasionally—very occasionally—there’s something genuinely useful buried in there.

But I also skim. Everyone does. You can’t not skim when you’re staring at 47 pages for a two-hour flight.

You learn patterns. You scan for your airport codes. You look for your route waypoints. You check the altitude ranges. You search for specific keywords: CLSD (closed), OBST (obstruction), UNAVBL (unavailable), WIP (work in progress). You learn to recognize the recurring garbage—the same parachute zones, the same wildlife hazards, the same diplomatic disputes—and skip past it.

You develop a sense for what matters and what doesn’t. Runway closure? Important. Taxiway edge lights out? Probably fine. Random warning about Yemen when you’re flying from Prague to Dublin? Safely ignored.

And you hope—really hope—that you didn’t miss anything important in the process.

Is this a good system? No. Is it safe? Debatable. Are we stuck with it? Probably.

The NOTAM about fixing NOTAMs has been active since 2019. No estimated completion date available.

Have you ever actually encountered a NOTAM that saved you from a problem, or one that you missed and wish you hadn’t?

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This is a narrow problem set. It’s also, as I discovered at the Irish Parachute Club last week, a surprisingly enjoyable one to solve.

A brief note on credentials: I have over a thousand hours of single-pilot turbine time. Every one of those hours was, by definition, flown alone. Formation flying hadn’t come up. You don’t get a lot of formation experience in your daily operations. So when the IPC asked whether I could help so that P750 and C208 Supervan could collaborate on a 22-way, I said yes and then spent a meaningful amount of time reading about something I’d never done, in preparation for having a conversation about it with a pilot I’d never met.

There's a well-known problem in the hospitality industry that I encountered while applying at 19-20 years old: every restaurant wants a waiter with experience, which means your first job requires lying about having it, after which you have it. Formation flying at dropzones works similarly, except the consequences of overstating your credentials are somewhat more immediate.

So, this article is my take at how formation flying happens at dropzones: you agree to it, you read, you brief, you draw a plan, and then you go for it.

Why you need two aircraft

The P750 carries fifteen skydivers to altitude comfortably. Fifteen is not twenty-two. The Supervan — a significantly modified C208 with a more powerful engine and a jump configuration that fits the role better than the stock Caravan — can add another twenty, but the goal here was more modest. So, twenty-two it was, with more planned for subsequent attempts if the Irish weather was cooperating more than usual, which is its own sentence.

For a formation this size, the jumpers exit from both aircraft simultaneously — or close enough to simultaneously that they can find each other in freefall and build the formation before altitude runs out. This means both aircraft need to be at the same point in space, at the same moment, at the same altitude and speed, with their doors open and their respective loads ready to go.

Which means the pilots need to have sorted out how that happens, well before anyone starts kitting up.

There was a practical problem that became apparent early: the C208 Supervan is considerably faster than the P750 in the climb. Two aircraft leaving the same airfield at the same time would not arrive at jump altitude at the same time. To figure out exactly how far apart they’d arrive, we flew “practice” loads first — timing both aircraft independently to 5,000 feet, FL100, and FL130, noting the difference at each level. The conclusion was that the Supervan needed to depart five minutes after the P750. The faster aircraft leaves later, catches up on the climb, and both arrive at the exit point together. Simple in principle. The kind of thing you only know with certainty once you’ve measured it.

The briefing

We spent about three hours split between two days (Irish weather…) on it. This seemed like a lot, until you realise how many things could go wrong in a twenty-minute flight involving two aircraft trying to occupy adjacent slices of airspace over the same small airfield.

The geometry worked like a figure eight with the airfield at the centre. The P750 climbs out to the north; the Supervan heads south. The goal for me was to be overhead the airfield at exactly FL110. Then, both aircraft converge around the two-minute call point at FL120. At that moment, the Supervan starts passing the P750 with visual contact and takes the lead — he maintains the jump run heading, calls the timing, and issues both the door signal and the green light. My job from that point is to trail, read back his calls, and stay exactly where I’m supposed to be. The vertical separation between us at the exit point: one hundred feet. FL130 for him, FL129 for me. Horizontal separation got as tight as 0.04 nautical miles, which translates to roughly seventy-five metres. This is not a lot of air between two turboprops flying at 85 knots IAS, which is slow enough that neither of us had much margin to do anything creative.

There was also a coordination requirement that doesn’t come up on a regular jump day: Dublin ATC. Both aircraft were being cleared to altitude under the same airspace, and the controllers needed to understand what we were actually doing — two aircraft converging intentionally at the same level, then flying in close proximity to a shared exit point. This isn’t something you explain in a standard departure call. It required a specific briefing note with ATC before the operation, confirming that the convergence and close separation were planned and coordinated rather than a conflict in progress.

Descent afterward: I beak north, descend, and land first. The Supervan goes west and then arcs north, following me visually as the second aircraft, and lands after I’d clear the runway. Clean separation both ways.

The emergencies section was short but specific. Lost communication with the ground: this means most likely no clearance, thus we we’d land; but there are more options of this scenario, so this one was briefed as “case by case”. Lost communication between the two aircraft: no drop, both return and land independently. Runway busy: the P750 can use runway 09 if 27 is occupied; the Supervan doesn’t have that option at this airfield and would divert to alternate. None of these things happened. We briefed them anyway, because the value of an emergency plan is entirely in having made it before you needed it.

The plan itself ended up drawn on a piece of paper. I’m a lawyer by day, which possibly explains why a twenty-minute operation generated a handwritten diagram with callsigns, altitudes, headings, timing notes, and a dedicated emergencies section in the top left corner. Kevin — the Supervan pilot, Dutch, experienced paradrop operator, perfectly fit to fly formation that day despite neither of us having done “much of it” before — looked at it, nodded, and made a copy of it for himself. I chose to take this as a compliment.

There’s something specific about trusting a pilot you met few hours ago. Not blind trust — three hours of briefing tells you quite a lot about how someone thinks, how they handle contingencies, whether they ask the right questions. But at some point you close the briefing, fold the piece of paper, and accept that the hundred feet between FL130 and FL129 will be maintained by Kevin doing his job, as he will accept that his Supervan won’t suddenly find a P750 filling his windscreen because I did mine. Professional trust between strangers is one of aviation’s quietly underrated features. It held up nicely over the Irish Midlands.

The part nobody tells you

There is something genuinely strange about looking out the left window during a climb and seeing another aircraft.

I have looked out the window during climbs many, many times. What’s usually there: sky, some cloud, a lot of green (in this case), the occasional bird making a questionable decision. What is not usually there: a C208 Supervan, climbing to altitude, in the same piece of sky, by arrangement.

It looks completely normal and completely wrong at the same time. Every instinct trained over a thousand hours of single-pilot operations quietly insists that another aircraft in your peripheral vision at close range is a problem to be solved. The rational part of the brain notes that this is, in fact, the plan, and that the other pilot briefed the same brief and is presumably having a symmetric experience looking out his right window at me.

The two parts of the brain do not immediately reconcile. They work it out by the time you’re established on jump run. But for the first few minutes of the climb together, there’s a specific vigilance that has nothing to do with concern and everything to do with the novelty of the situation.

By the time we were settled into the turn into jumprun and both aircraft were doing exactly what the piece of paper said they’d do, it had shifted into something else. Something closer to satisfaction, or the specific pleasure of a complex thing happening smoothly because two people thought about it (and briefed many more) carefully enough in advance.

The jump

The two-minute call. Position confirmed. Lead aircraft steady at FL130. Me at FL129, slightly right and below, matching his speed on jump run heading.

0.2 before the exit point, the lead calls green.

Twenty people plus two camera flyers exit two aircraft at approximately the same moment over the dropzone and begin the process of finding each other in freefall. The goal was a sequential record — a specific discipline where the formation builds and breaks in a defined sequence rather than simply assembling and holding. From my seat, I see all of them disappear through C208 door and my aircraft lightens as they go. Last one out, door closed, and I’m peeling north while the Supervan arcs west and then follows me down.

The record didn’t happen. Sequential is unforgiving — the timing of breaks and rebuilds across twenty people and a finite amount of altitude doesn’t leave much room. But they made first point, which means the formation assembled, and at this scale, on a first few attempts, with two aircraft that had never flown together before, that’s a reasonable result. The jumpers were happy enough. The debrief had the specific energy of people who know exactly what went wrong and are already planning the next event like that.

What I didn’t expect

I expected the preparation to be the interesting part, and it was. I didn’t expect the formation pattern itself — the two aircraft doing their separate loops and converging on the same line — to be as visually clear from the inside as it was. When you’re flying it, you can see the geometry working. The other aircraft appears in the right place at the right time because you both agreed where and when that was.

I also didn’t expect to find it as much fun as I did. Not the adrenaline-adjacent fun of something difficult and uncertain, but the specific satisfaction of a problem that was genuinely interesting, solved carefully, and executed cleanly.

There are aspects of flying that become routine quickly. The pattern, the checklists, the radio calls — all of it develops muscle memory and stops requiring conscious attention. Formation flying hasn’t reached that point yet for me, and given how infrequently the opportunity comes up, it probably won’t any time soon. Which means it stays in the category of things that require thinking, and things that require thinking tend to be more interesting than things that don’t.

The P750 is going back to regular jump operations. Kevin’s Supervan is presumably doing the same somewhere in the Netherlands. The twenty-two-way formation has been jumped and landed and cheered on.

The piece of paper is probably in a bin somewhere. It did its job.

Have you jumped a large formation — and did you think about what the pilots were managing while you were managing your own part of the exit?

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They don’t get the choice.

European flights operate in a system of designated airways—specific routes through the sky connecting navigation points called waypoints. A flight from Warsaw to London doesn’t just fly west. It could and would fly like this:

EPWA OLILA6G OLILA DCT SOMOR DCT GRUDA DCT MALOX DCT DEVEL DCT LUSID DCT ROE DCT ROXUB DCT TIDVU DCT NISLO DCT KOKAK DCT ASKEG DCT ODDON DCT RIDSI DCT NAVDA DCT BAVTA DCT MIKRO KY875 DINOK DCT EKMOL DCT DOROR DCT GOREV DCT CUTEL DCT OTLAB DCT TENDO DCT NWI DCT BKY DCT LAM LOGAN2H EGLL

That's an actual routing, though admittedly an exaggerated example chosen to make the point. The pattern holds regardless: airport to waypoint to airway to waypoint to airway (where DCT means “direct”), following invisible highways through the sky designed in the 1950s and largely unchanged since. The alphanumeric soup translates to a specific path that keeps the aircraft on approved routes, at approved altitudes, coordinated with air traffic control across multiple countries.

This costs airlines millions. Industry estimates suggest optimal direct routing would reduce European flight distances by 5-8% on average. That’s tens of millions of euros in fuel annually just burning in the atmosphere because aircraft can’t fly straight.

Here’s why the system works this way, why it hasn’t changed despite decades of complaints, and why your two-hour flight is taking the long way around.

The Earth Is Round (Which Complicates Things Immediately)

Before getting into airways and air traffic control, there’s a basic geographic fact that explains part of the routing confusion (flat-earthers, take a deep breath): Earth is a sphere, and the shortest distance between two points on a sphere isn’t a straight line on a flat map.

Great circle routes—the actual shortest path between two cities—curve on traditional map projections. A flight from Los Angeles to London doesn’t go straight east. It curves north over Newfoundland, southern Greenland, and Iceland before descending southeast into the UK. On a Mercator projection this looks wildly inefficient. On a globe, it’s the shortest path.

If you want to see this visually, gcmap.com is excellent—plug in any two airports and it’ll show you the great circle route on both a flat map and a globe projection. Makes it immediately obvious why routing over Greenland is actually shorter than going straight east.

This explains why transatlantic flights route over Greenland—they’re following Earth’s curvature, not taking a detour. The map lies about what “straight” means at intercontinental distances.

But great circle routes only explain some routing oddities. They don’t explain why Warsaw to London goes via Denmark when a great circle would cross Germany. They don’t explain zigzag patterns on shorter European flights where Earth’s curvature barely matters. They don’t explain why your Munich to Rome flight routes through Austria and Slovenia instead of crossing the Alps more directly.

The real answer: commercial aviation operates on a structured system of airways that aircraft must follow, regardless of whether those airways represent the most efficient path.

Airways: The Highway System Nobody Sees

Imagine if cars could drive anywhere—across fields, through forests, directly from origin to destination ignoring roads entirely. Traffic would be chaos. Nobody would know where anyone else was going. Collisions would be constant. You’d need impossible coordination just to prevent disasters.

Roads solve this by constraining where vehicles can go while making traffic manageable. Everyone knows where everyone else is traveling. You can predict flows, manage intersections, separate opposing traffic. The constraint enables the system to function.

Airways do the same thing for aircraft. They’re designated routes through the sky connecting navigation points called waypoints or fixes. Aircraft fly from waypoint to waypoint along published airways, and air traffic controllers manage traffic by assigning specific airways, altitudes, and speeds to keep aircraft separated.

These airways have names. In Europe, they’re identified by a letter and number: UL9, UM605, UN490. The letter indicates airway type—U for upper airspace above 24,500 feet, L for lower—and the number identifies the specific route. In the US, they’re called jet routes at high altitude and victor airways at low altitude: J121, V194, and so on.

The Warsaw to London route I mentioned earlier is not exactly typical for airlines traffic, but it shows the pattern. The aircraft follows a chain of waypoints connected by designated airways from departure to destination. Flight planning software calculates the routing, files it with air traffic control, and controllers approve or modify it based on traffic, weather, and airspace availability.

Why force aircraft onto specific routes when modern GPS could allow direct navigation? Because managing 30,000 daily European flights on random trajectories would be impossible. Controllers would need to track 30,000 unique paths, predict conflicts, and issue individual instructions to prevent collisions. The workload would be unmanageable.

Airways reduce complexity. Controllers know where aircraft are because they’re following published routes. They know where aircraft are going because airways connect predictable waypoints. They manage traffic by assigning different airways or altitudes to aircraft heading similar directions. The constraint—forcing aircraft onto specific routes—enables the system to function at scale.

Without airways, air traffic control collapses. With airways, it’s manageable but inefficient.

How We Got Here: Radio Beacons and Infrastructure That Never Died

The airway system wasn’t designed for modern GPS-equipped jets. It was designed for 1950s aircraft navigating with ground-based radio beacons.

Early commercial aviation used visual navigation—following rivers, roads, railroads, landmarks. This worked in good weather at low altitude. It failed in clouds, at night, or over water. Airlines needed systems that worked regardless of visibility.

The solution was radio navigation. Governments installed ground-based transmitters called VORs—VHF Omnidirectional Range stations—and NDBs—Non-Directional Beacons—at strategic locations. These beacons transmitted radio signals that aircraft receivers could detect and follow. A pilot tuned to a VOR frequency, got a bearing to the station, and flew toward it. Chain together multiple VORs, and you could navigate from origin to destination following beacon to beacon.

Airways were originally defined as routes connecting these ground stations. You’d fly from the Warsaw VOR to the Berlin VOR to the Amsterdam VOR to the London VOR, following radio signals station to station. The routes were necessarily indirect because they depended on where governments had installed transmitters, which depended on terrain, available real estate, funding, and political considerations.

This infrastructure was built out globally from the 1950s through 1980s. Thousands of VOR and NDB stations. Tens of thousands of published airways. International agreements on airspace boundaries and procedures. Decades of work and billions in investment.

Then GPS happened. By the 1990s, satellite navigation made ground-based beacons technically obsolete. Modern jets know their position to within meters using GPS satellites. They could theoretically fly direct from any point to any other point without following airways at all. Navigation technology advanced beyond the infrastructure it was navigating through.

But the infrastructure didn’t change. The airway system remained because it wasn’t just about navigation—it was about traffic management. Even with GPS, controllers still need predictable routes to manage traffic. Even with modern avionics, aircraft still need to coordinate movements through congested airspace. The technical capability to fly direct doesn’t solve the organizational problem of managing tens of thousands of flights sharing the same sky.

So we’re still flying some routes designed for 1950s radio navigation even though the navigation technology is obsolete. The infrastructure has inertia. Changing it requires international coordination, billions in investment, controller retraining, procedure updates, and years of transition. It’s easier to keep using the existing system even though everyone knows it’s inefficient.

Many of the VOR stations are still operating, maintained at substantial cost, because some procedures still reference them and because decommissioning them requires updating thousands of charts and procedures. We’re paying to maintain navigation infrastructure we don’t technically need anymore because the traffic management system is built around it.

European Airspace: A Political Mess Frozen in Time

European airspace is particularly inefficient because it’s divided into dozens of national Flight Information Regions, each controlled by different countries with different procedures, different languages, and different priorities.

A flight from Warsaw to London crosses Polish airspace, then German, then Dutch or Belgian, then British. Each country’s air traffic control manages their own region, hands off aircraft at boundaries, and coordinates traffic through their airspace according to their own national procedures and priorities.

This made sense when established after World War II. Countries wanted sovereign control over their airspace. National air traffic control services were funded by national governments and served national interests. The system developed organically with each country building airways based on local needs and constraints.

The problem is that air traffic doesn’t respect national boundaries. An aircraft from southern Poland to western UK crosses five or six countries in two hours. The optimal route would cut straight across Germany, but German airspace is incredibly congested because Germany sits in central Europe and every flight crossing the continent transits German airspace. Routes get pushed north through less congested Danish or Baltic airspace, or south through Czech and Austrian airspace, creating inefficiencies.

Eurocontrol—a multinational organization coordinating European air traffic—tries to manage this by issuing traffic flow restrictions when regions get saturated. If German airspace is overloaded, Eurocontrol pushes some flights onto alternative routes to balance load. This is why flights sometimes get rerouted through Denmark even though the original flight plan went through Germany. Somebody at Eurocontrol decided German controllers were handling maximum capacity that hour and redistributed traffic.

The European Union has been trying to fix this for over twenty years through the Single European Sky initiative. The idea is reorganizing European airspace by traffic flow rather than national boundaries, creating functional airspace blocks that ignore political borders, and implementing more efficient routing. Progress has been glacial because it requires countries to surrender airspace sovereignty and merge national air traffic control services, which nobody wants to do.

Aviation generates billions in economic activity. Air traffic control employs tens of thousands of people. Countries view their airspace as strategic national infrastructure. Surrendering control to a multinational European agency—even if it would improve efficiency—means giving up sovereignty, potentially losing jobs, and trusting other countries to manage critical infrastructure. The politics are impossible.

So European flights continue flying inefficient routes because airspace is optimized for national control rather than traffic flow, and fixing it requires political will that doesn’t exist.

North Atlantic Tracks: When Airways Move Every Day

The North Atlantic is the busiest oceanic airspace in the world with hundreds of daily flights between North America and Europe. It’s also mostly empty ocean with no radar coverage and minimal air traffic control infrastructure.

The solution is the North Atlantic Track system. Every day, air traffic authorities publish a set of routes—usually five to ten parallel tracks spaced about 60 nautical miles apart—that aircraft should use when crossing the Atlantic. These tracks aren’t fixed. They shift north or south and curve differently each day based on weather patterns, wind forecasts, and expected traffic.

The tracks are optimized for jetstream winds that blow west-to-east across the Atlantic at high altitude. Airlines want to ride the jetstream eastbound to save fuel and time, and avoid it westbound to prevent headwinds. Eastbound tracks curve north to catch strong tailwinds while westbound tracks route south to minimize headwinds.

On winter days with strong jetstream, eastbound tracks might cruise 60-70 mph faster than westbound tracks at identical altitude and airspeed, purely from wind. This saves airlines significant fuel and cuts flight time by 30-60 minutes. The track system enables optimization by coordinating where aircraft fly so everyone can chase favorable winds without conflicting.

Aircraft file flight plans requesting specific tracks based on departure time, destination, and forecast winds. Controllers approve tracks ensuring proper separation, and aircraft fly assigned tracks across the ocean. Once reaching European or North American airspace, they rejoin normal airways and proceed to destination.

This is one of few places where routing is somewhat flexible and regularly optimized. But it only works because it’s oceanic airspace with low traffic density, no terrain, and no national boundaries to negotiate. Over land with congested airspace and multiple countries, daily route optimization isn’t practical.

Why You Can’t Just Fly Direct

The apparent emptiness between cities is deceptive. Several constraints prevent direct routing even when it looks like nothing stands in the way.

Military restricted areas and danger zones exist in every country—airspace reserved for training, weapons testing, or security purposes. These areas are off-limits to civilian aircraft or available only with specific clearance and timing. Direct routes often cross military areas that force aircraft onto published airways skirting restricted zones. A Barcelona to Rome flight might need to route around French or Italian military training areas that aren’t marked on passenger maps but are very real to flight planners.

Noise abatement procedures impose additional constraints. Cities restrict aircraft overflights to reduce noise pollution, especially at night. Airports have specific departure and arrival procedures routing aircraft away from populated areas. These procedures force aircraft onto tracks that curve around cities rather than flying directly overhead, even when direct routing would be shorter.

Weather avoidance requires structured routing. Thunderstorms, turbulence, icing conditions—pilots need to deviate around weather, and controllers need to know where those deviations will take aircraft. If everyone’s flying random direct routes and suddenly deviating for weather, coordination becomes impossible. Airways provide structure making deviations manageable because controllers know where everyone started and where they’re trying to go.

Terrain constrains routing because aircraft need safe altitudes with margins for emergencies. If you lose pressurization or suffer engine failure, you need to descend immediately. If you’re over the Alps when that happens, you need altitude to clear peaks while descending to breathable air. Airways are designed accounting for terrain clearance requirements, especially for lower-altitude routes where mountains pose immediate hazards.

International coordination requires predictable handoffs. Flights crossing airspace boundaries need smooth transfers between countries’ air traffic control. This requires agreement on which routes aircraft will use, at what altitudes, at what speeds. Airways standardize these handoffs. Controllers know aircraft on airway UN491 approaching the Polish-German border will hand off to German control at specific waypoints at specific altitudes. Random direct routes would require constant negotiation between controllers in different countries.

All these constraints combine to make direct routing impractical even when technically possible. The sky looks empty but it’s heavily structured.

When You CAN Fly More Direct

Exceptions exist. Some regions and situations allow flexibility.

Oceanic and remote airspace has less structure because traffic density is low and constraints are fewer. North Atlantic Tracks provide some flexibility as discussed. Pacific routes have similar systems. Overflying Siberia or Arctic regions, aircraft often get more direct clearances because there’s minimal conflicting traffic and few restrictions.

Business jets and general aviation get more direct routing than commercial airlines because they fly at higher altitudes with less traffic, they’re more flexible about timing, and controllers can accommodate individual requests when managing one aircraft instead of coordinating dozens.

Off-peak hours like overnight in Europe or early morning in US have less traffic, and controllers can sometimes approve more direct routes because they’re not managing congestion. Airlines filing flight plans for 2am departures sometimes get shortcuts unavailable during busy daytime hours.

Aviation authorities are incrementally implementing systems allowing more flexibility. In Europe, it’s called Free Route Airspace—specific regions where aircraft can fly more direct between entry and exit points instead of following rigid airways. In the US, it’s NextGen with similar concepts. These systems use better surveillance—ADS-B transponders providing precise GPS position—and better computer tools letting controllers manage traffic without forcing everyone onto predefined airways.

But these are incremental improvements, not revolutionary changes. The airway system remains the backbone of air traffic management and will continue for decades because infrastructure is too embedded to replace quickly.

The Cost Airlines Pay

Airlines hate this system because inefficiency directly costs money. Every extra kilometer burns fuel. Every extra minute costs crew time and aircraft utilization. Every ton of fuel burned is payload capacity lost.

Industry estimates suggest optimal routing—if aircraft could fly perfect direct routes—would reduce European flight distances by 5-8% on average. That translates to tens of millions of euros in fuel savings annually across the European aviation industry. It’s also significant carbon emissions reductions, increasingly important as aviation faces pressure to reduce environmental impact.

Five to eight percent sounds modest until you calculate actual costs. A typical narrow-body aircraft burns roughly 2,500 kilograms of fuel per hour. At current European jet fuel prices around 800 euros per ton, that’s 2,000 euros per flight hour in fuel costs alone. A two-hour flight from Warsaw to London burns 5,000 kilograms of fuel costing 4,000 euros. If you could reduce that flight by 8% through optimal routing—about 10 minutes and 400 kilograms of fuel—you’d save 320 euros per flight.

Multiply that across thousands of daily European flights, and the inefficiency costs hundreds of millions annually. That’s money that could reduce ticket prices, improve airline profitability, or reduce environmental impact. Instead it’s burned as exhaust over Denmark because the routing system is optimized for traffic management rather than fuel efficiency.

Airlines lobby constantly for more efficient routing. They participate in industry groups pushing for Single European Sky implementation, Free Route Airspace expansion, better coordination between air traffic control centers. They invest in flight planning software finding the most efficient routes within current constraints. They file optimal flight plans hoping controllers approve them.

But they’re constrained by the system. Flight planners can calculate optimal routes, but if air traffic control denies the request and assigns a longer route, the airline has no choice. You can’t ignore ATC instructions and fly direct—that’s how midair collisions happen and how you lose your operating certificate.

So airlines continue flying inefficient routes, burning extra fuel, losing extra time, complaining to regulators and industry organizations, and accepting that this is simply how the system works.

Why This Won’t Change Quickly

The system persists because changing it is extraordinarily difficult.

Infrastructure has inertia. The current airway system works—it’s safe, predictable, and understood by everyone in the industry. Commercial aviation is incredibly safe partly because controlled airspace with structured routing prevents conflicts. Replacing this system requires coordination across hundreds of countries, thousands of airports, tens of thousands of controllers, and millions of pilots. The scope is enormous.

Transition costs are massive. New surveillance systems, new computer systems for controllers, new procedures developed and tested and trained and implemented simultaneously across entire regions. We’re talking billions of euros and years of work to achieve maybe 5-8% efficiency improvement. The return on investment exists but it’s not dramatic enough to generate urgent political action.

International coordination is genuinely hard. Aviation is global but regulation is national. Every country wants input into how their airspace is managed. Getting consensus on major changes requires international treaties negotiated over years or decades. The Single European Sky initiative launched in 2004 and hasn’t achieved core goals twenty-two years later. That’s typical pace for international aviation coordination.

Risk aversion is high in aviation. The industry is safe because it’s conservative about changes. Every new procedure is tested exhaustively. Every system change is validated through simulations and trials before implementation. This is good for safety but it slows innovation. Nobody wants responsibility for implementing new systems that cause accidents, so changes happen incrementally with extensive validation.

And passengers don’t care enough. This is behind-the-scenes efficiency. Passengers experience it as slightly longer flight times or slightly higher fares, but it’s not dramatic enough to generate political pressure. If flights suddenly took twice as long or cost twice as much because of routing, there’d be outcry. At 5-8% inefficiency, nobody outside the industry pays attention.

So we’ll keep flying routes that look circuitous on maps. Airlines will keep complaining about inefficiency. Regulators will make incremental improvements. The fundamental structure will remain because changing it is harder than living with the inefficiency.

What You’re Actually Seeing

When you open FlightRadar24 and watch your flight taking a strange route, you’re seeing the physical manifestation of decades of infrastructure decisions, political compromises, and technical constraints.

You’re seeing airways designed around 1950s radio beacons that still constrain modern GPS-equipped aircraft because the traffic management system depends on them.

You’re seeing national airspace boundaries from post-WWII agreements that don’t align with efficient traffic flows but can’t be redrawn without countries surrendering sovereignty.

You’re seeing military restricted areas, noise abatement procedures, and terrain constraints forcing routes around obstacles invisible on tracking apps.

You’re seeing the compromise between safety and efficiency where safety wins every time because the alternative is unacceptable.

Your flight from Warsaw to London routes through Denmark not because anyone thinks that’s optimal, but because it’s the route that fits within all constraints the system imposes. It’s approved by air traffic control. It avoids restricted areas. It follows published airways controllers know how to manage. It coordinates handoffs between Polish, German, Danish, and British controllers at predictable points.

It’s not perfect. It’s just what’s possible given the system we have.

Maybe eventually we’ll have Free Route Airspace everywhere with aircraft flying optimal great circle routes managed by computers sophisticated enough to maintain separation without rigid airways. Maybe air traffic control will become like GPS navigation for cars—dynamic, optimized, continuously updated based on real-time conditions.

But that’s not happening soon. For now, commercial aviation flies highways in the sky, and sometimes those highways take routes that don’t make sense if you’re just looking at a map thinking about straight lines.

Airlines would prefer direct routing. It would save them millions. But they don’t get to choose. The system chooses for them, and the system was designed for different times. It works. It’s safe. It’s just inefficient. And that inefficiency costs you money every time you fly, burned as fuel over airspace you’re not even trying to reach.

Have you noticed particularly strange routing on flights you’ve taken? Or tracked flights on FlightRadar24 that seemed to take bizarre paths? What’s the longest detour you’ve seen?

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And yet dropzones exist. People build them, run them, lose money on them with remarkable consistency, and somehow keep going. Understanding why requires first understanding what the economics actually look like — which is something the industry discusses mostly in private, over beers, with the resigned laughter of people who knew what they were getting into and did it anyway.

The aircraft: your most expensive employee

Every dropzone’s largest cost is the aircraft. This seems obvious until you actually sit with the numbers.

A PAC P-750 XSTOL — a common jump aircraft — costs somewhere north of a 1.5 million USD used, more like 2.5 million new in 2026. That’s before it does anything. Before it burns a litre of fuel or carries a single jumper.

Once it starts operating, the costs follow. Jet-A fuel at a rate that makes car ownership look frugal. Engine reserves — the money you set aside per flight hour because at some point the engine will need an overhaul that costs more than most people’s apartments. Scheduled maintenance at defined hour or calendar intervals that does not care whether the season was good or bad or rained out for three weekends. Insurance, which is priced by people who are very aware of what happens when aircraft stop flying correctly.

The aircraft requires a licensed engineer to sign off on anything beyond the most basic servicing. It requires a certified jump pilot, who is a specific subset of commercial pilots with specific ratings and specific experience. It requires a transponder that works, avionics that work, a door mechanism that works, and a hundred other systems whose failure will ground operations immediately regardless of how many jumpers are booked that day.

The aircraft does not care about your weekend schedule. It does not care that you have twenty students arriving Saturday morning. It cares about oil pressure and turbine temperatures and whether the inspection interval has been reached. When it wants attention, it gets it, and you can work around everything else.

The weather: your silent business partner

If the aircraft is your most expensive employee, the weather is your most powerful business partner — one with absolutely no interest in your revenue targets.

A jump operation in central Europe has roughly five to six months of reliable operating weather per year. May through September with a good April and October if you’re lucky. The rest is either too cold for comfortable operations, too consistently overcast, or both.

Within those five to six months, weather cancels roughly a third of jump days. Wind above limits. Cloud base below minimums. Thunderstorms that appear on Saturday afternoon with the enthusiasm of an uninvited guest. Morning fog that lifts at 2 PM, which means by the time operations can start, half your jumpers have gone home.

Your costs do not take the same days off. The aircraft insurance renews in January whether you flew in December or not. The hangar rent is monthly. The engineer’s availability doesn’t adjust for the forecast.

This creates a business model where you earn essentially all your money in a five-month window, distributed across whatever days the weather permits, and you pay costs across all twelve months. The margin for error is thin enough that a single unusually bad summer can define whether the year was viable or not.

Every dropzone operator checks the weather forecast with a specific kind of attention that non-operators don’t quite understand. It’s not curiosity. It’s the focused concern of someone watching their cash flow.

What it actually costs to put someone in the air

Jumpers, not unreasonably, think about the price of their jump ticket. What they don’t often think about is what that price has to cover before anything lands in an account as profit.

Take a simple lift. Fifteen jumpers to 4,000 metres on the P-750. The fuel burn for that lift is somewhere between 80 and 100 litres. At current Jet-A prices, that’s a significant number before anyone has opened a door. Then the engine reserve per hour. The maintenance reserve per cycle. The pilot’s time. The proportion of the daily insurance cost attributable to that lift. The land rent. the proportion of the hangar and ferry costs. The gear used. The manifesting. The airspace coordination.

By the time all of that is accounted for, the margin per jump ticket is not what most jumpers imagine when they’re handing over the money. The jump feels expensive. The economics say it probably isn’t expensive enough.

This is the conversation dropzone owners have among themselves and almost never have publicly, because the response to “actually our margins are thin” is inevitably “well your prices should be lower.” The logic runs entirely the wrong direction. But the conversation is uncomfortable either way, so it mostly doesn’t happen.

The staff problem

A dropzone needs certified people to do essentially everything that matters.

AFF instructors require a rating that takes considerable time, money, and jump numbers to obtain, followed by recurrency requirements that mean you can’t just hire someone once and expect them to stay current without jumping regularly. Tandem instructors similarly. Riggers — the people who pack reserve parachutes and maintain equipment — require a licence that is its own involved certification process.

Everyone needs to maintain currency, which means they need to jump, which costs money, which the dropzone either subsidises or doesn’t, which affects whether they stay employed at your DZ or the one that subsidises better.

The best instructors are experienced skydivers who could be jumping recreationally anywhere. They work at dropzones partly because they enjoy it and partly for the discount on their own jumps. This is great for culture and complicated for payroll negotiations, because the line between “staff” and “enthusiast who also does instructing” is blurry in a way that makes HR departments nervous.

In Poland, the regulatory overlay adds another layer. Staff need appropriate certifications recognised by the local CAA called Urząd Lotnictwa Cywilnego. Equipment needs to be maintained under certified frameworks. The paperwork for a single season of operations would alarm anyone who encountered it for the first time.

The airspace issue

Running a dropzone requires consistent access to airspace above it. This access is not guaranteed.

In Poland, military training areas activate on a schedule that correlates poorly with jump days. A TRA — Temporary Reserved Area — can appear in the weekly NOTAM brief, covering exactly the altitude range the operation needs, rendering the entire weekend unviable while the costs tick along regardless.

The relationship between a dropzone’s preferred operating airspace and everyone else who also wants to use that airspace is managed through PAŻP — the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency — and involves a degree of coordination, application, and occasional negotiation that constitutes a significant operational overhead. Getting and maintaining the right airspace permissions is not a one-time task. It is ongoing, bureaucratic, and occasionally maddening.

When the airspace is available, great. When it isn’t, you’re on the ground with full costs and no revenue, watching military jets use the air you were planning to bill against.

The load economics nobody mentions

Here is something that happens at every dropzone and is almost never discussed openly with jumpers: the decision about whether to fly a partial load.

The aircraft costs almost the same to fly with four people as with fourteen. Fuel burn and flight time is slightly lower with fewer people, but the fixed costs — engine reserve, maintenance reserve, insurance attribution, pilot salary — are essentially the same regardless of how many seats are filled.

A lift with four jumpers generates roughly a third of the revenue of a full load at the same operating cost. At some point, this arithmetic produces a lift that doesn’t cover its costs. The dropzone is then choosing between flying at a loss, waiting for more people to arrive, or cancelling the lift.

None of these options makes everyone happy. Flying at a loss is bad economics. Waiting frustrates the people who arrived on time and are ready. Cancelling frustrates everyone.

The decision gets made dozens of times per season, usually by whoever is running manifest that day, usually without being explained to the people waiting. It looks like operational delays. It is actually applied mathematics with no good answer.

Why people do it anyway

Given all of the above, the obvious question is why anyone builds or runs a dropzone at all.

The answer is not complicated, but it doesn’t show up in any spreadsheet. The people who build dropzones are skydivers first and business operators second, sometimes a distant second. They want a place to jump. They want their community to have a place to jump. They want to fly aircraft and teach people to skydive and spend their working hours in an environment they’d choose to be in regardless.

The business is the mechanism that makes this sustainable, not the goal. When it works — when the season is good and the weather cooperates and the aircraft behaves and the airspace is available and enough jumpers show up to fill the loads — there is something specific about running a day of jump operations that doesn’t translate well to any other context.

When it doesn’t work, you fix whatever is broken and try again next weekend.

This is not a particularly rational approach to business. It is, however, a completely understandable approach to life, which is why dropzones continue to exist despite the economics suggesting they probably shouldn’t.

What this means for your jump ticket

If you’ve read this far and your first thought is “so jumps should be cheaper,” you have missed the point with impressive efficiency.

The price of a jump ticket is what it is because the costs underneath it are what they are. An operation that prices below its actual costs is an operation that will not be there next season. Several aren’t, for exactly this reason.

The dropzones that have been running for twenty, thirty or more years — the ones with the good culture and the experienced instructors and the well-maintained aircraft — are the ones where someone, somewhere, has been doing the unglamorous work of making the economics function. Not profitably, necessarily. But sustainably enough to keep showing up.

The jump is expensive because JET A1 fuel is expensive, because certified instructors are expensive, because airspace coordination is expensive, because maintaining aircraft and skydiving equipment to the standard required by people falling out of them is expensive.

And because somewhere on the airfield, someone did the maths and decided it was worth doing anyway.

They were probably right. Just not about the profit part. Ask their spouses about the part where the dropzone got the weekends and the family got whatever was left.

Do you know what your home dropzone’s jump ticket actually covers — or have you been quietly assuming there’s more margin in there than there is?

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HEX (2022) is that film. A group of skydivers attempts a formation called The Hex, one of them disappears mid-jump, and the remaining members start dying in increasingly improbable ways. It’s distributed by Lionsgate, which is either an endorsement or a warning depending on your relationship with Lionsgate films.

I watched it so you don’t have to. Although if you’re a skydiver, you probably should — not because it’s good, but because it is genuinely fascinating to watch a film that gets the skydiving almost completely right and the horror almost completely wrong.

Who made this and why it matters

The production crew behind HEX has a combined total of over 25,000 skydives. This is not a throwaway press release detail. It explains everything that works about the film and also, indirectly, everything that doesn’t.

When a group of experienced skydivers decides to make a movie, what they produce is a film with exceptional aerial footage, an authentic drop zone atmosphere, and believable skydiving culture on screen. The freefall sequences are genuinely impressive. Whoever was operating the camera in the air knew exactly what they were doing. The exit techniques look correct. The body positions in freefall look correct. The canopy footage looks correct.

What the production crew apparently did not have among their 25,000 collective jumps was a screenwriter. Hans Rodionoff, who wrote the script, has credits including Deep Blue Sea 2 and Lost Boys: The Thirst, which is a filmography that prepares you reasonably well for what follows.

The plot, as it exists (spoilers ahead)

Sarah is a loner skydiver with a tragic backstory she is apparently the only person in her drop zone community who doesn’t know about. A man named Payson — and we will return to this name — wants her to join his crew of six to attempt The Hex, a formation jump that is allegedly cursed because everyone who has previously completed it has ended up dead.

This is presented as a reason to attempt the jump rather than, more logically, an extremely good reason not to.

They attempt The Hex once, fail, and try again the next day. They succeed on the second attempt. Payson disappears mid-freefall. The remaining jumpers then begin dying in ways that have no apparent connection to each other or to skydiving. One has all the bones in their body spontaneously break. One has a heart attack. One’s apartment explodes. A man accidentally shoots himself in the face with a rifle, which requires a specific sequence of bad decisions I won’t attempt to reconstruct here.

The film describes this as “paranormal.” A skydiver might describe it as “a script in which the writers ran out of skydiving-adjacent death ideas by page forty and started improvising.”

The opening scene

HEX opens with a montage: old illustrations of demons, skydivers performing a formation, and — the film’s establishing horror image — blood being dripped onto an altimeter as it’s being assembled.

Let me explain why this doesn’t work for anyone who knows what an altimeter is.

Altimeters are not assembled in rituals. They are either analog instruments calibrated to local pressure settings, or digital devices. They come from manufacturers. They are maintained by certified equipment technicians. A rigger dripping blood on an altimeter during its “assembly” is not a thing that happens. The image is attempting to communicate “cursed object placed with malicious intent” and instead communicates “screenwriter has seen skydiving equipment from a distance and assumed it was more mystical than it is.”

More importantly: if your altimeter is wrong, the worst case is that you open at an unexpected altitude. This is a real safety concern in skydiving and not one to dismiss. But it does not cause demonic possession, interdimensional kidnapping, or spontaneous bone disintegration. It causes you to open higher or lower than planned.

A cursed altimeter is one of the least terrifying premises possible in skydiving equipment. The writers would have done better with a cursed AAD — the automatic activation device that fires your reserve if you’re unconscious below a certain altitude. A malfunctioning AAD can genuinely kill you. A cursed one would at least make mechanical sense as a horror premise. But nobody in the writing room apparently knew this.

The Hex formation: a six-person star by any other name

The film treats The Hex as a legendary, mythologized formation of immense difficulty. Characters speak about it with the reverence normally reserved for summit attempts. Completing it requires exactly six people. It has allegedly killed or disappeared everyone who has ever successfully performed it.

A six-person formation in skydiving is called a 6-way. It is a standard discipline. There are weekend competitions for it. Intermediate skydivers build them. The specific hexagonal arrangement the film shows — six people holding grips in a star or hexagonal pattern — is a configuration that jump groups attempt on weekend fun jumps.

The idea that a 6-way has a proper name, a mythology, a body count, and a requirement for exactly this set of six specific people would strike any working AFF instructor as bizarre. You put up a call on the manifest board. People volunteer. You jump. If the formation looks like a hexagon from above, that’s because you planned it that way, not because you’ve summoned something.

The film’s first attempt at The Hex fails and they try again the next day. This is realistic — formations often require multiple attempts for clean completions. The drama around “we finally got The Hex” is overdone, but the structure of attempt, fail, regroup, attempt again is accurate to how formation work actually happens.

What isn’t accurate is what they do next.

Jumping the day after someone vanishes

Payson disappears mid-freefall after the successful completion of The Hex. He is not on any video of the jump. He simply isn’t there. One of your six-person formation has ceased to exist somewhere between exit altitude and the ground.

The group’s response the next day is to load up and jump again.

This is where the film loses any remaining credibility with actual skydivers. In real operations, a jumper failing to return from a skydive triggers an immediate and serious sequence of events. The DZ is shut down. A search is initiated. The FAA or national aviation authority is notified. A fatality investigation begins. Other jumpers are grounded pending the outcome.

Nobody gets back on the aircraft the following morning. Nobody.

The film needs this to happen for plot reasons — one of the jumpers has a heart attack mid-freefall on the second jump — but the casual acceptance that six people who just watched a friend vanish would simply show up at the DZ for another lift requires the audience to forget everything they know about how human beings respond to disappearances.

At a real drop zone, the manifest desk would be shut, the aircraft would be grounded, and everyone would be answering questions from people in official vehicles. The absence of any of this is the film’s most significant failure of realism, worse than anything supernatural that follows.

The heart attack in freefall

One of the jumpers dies of a heart attack during the second jump. In freefall. This is presented as a mysterious paranormal death.

Here is what actually happens when a jumper becomes incapacitated in freefall: they go limp, adopt an unstable position — typically face-down — and begin a free descent. Modern equipment includes an Automatic Activation Device, which fires the reserve parachute automatically below a certain altitude if the jumper is still in freefall. The AAD exists specifically because people can lose consciousness in freefall. It is not foolproof, but it is not nothing.

The film presents a jumper dying of a heart attack during freefall as a death with no possible intervention. In reality, depending on altitude, an AAD activation might deploy the reserve, potentially allowing for a survivable landing even for an unconscious jumper. The film ignores this because it complicates the death, and a horror film that stops to explain Cypres activation thresholds would be a different kind of film entirely.

This is a small point about equipment accuracy. The larger point is that “heart attack during freefall” is a skydiving death that the sport has thought about and partially addressed through technology. The film treats it as a supernatural killing rather than a known risk that the industry has developed mitigation for. The reality is both more technically interesting and more sobering than the film’s version.

The bones that spontaneously break

At some point in the second act, a jumper has all the bones in their body spontaneously break.

This has no relationship to skydiving. The person happens to be a skydiver. The death happens on the ground. There is no parachute, no aircraft, no altitude involved. The screenwriter has run out of aviation-adjacent death mechanisms and has moved into general supernatural violence that could apply to any character in any horror film.

I note this because it represents the precise moment HEX stops being a skydiving horror film and becomes a horror film that happens to have skydivers in it. The deaths should, in a properly constructed horror film about skydiving, involve the thing that makes skydiving specifically dangerous. Equipment failures. Reserve malfunctions. Altitude miscalculations. Entanglement. Collision. Opening shock. Mid-air collision under canopy. There is a rich catalogue of genuine aviation-adjacent horror available.

Instead: the bones.

The hung jumper scene

The film includes a scene involving a jumper whose equipment becomes entangled on the aircraft — hanging from the plane, unable to get free. At least one reviewer noted this scene was shot practically, with the production actually filming someone “pretending to be a dead body dangling from a plane on a stuck seatbelt,” which required real-world aviation stunt work.

This is the one genuinely terrifying scenario in the film, and the reason is that it’s real. Entanglement incidents are rare but documented in skydiving history. They require immediate, specific, correctly executed response from the pilot. There is no standard procedure because each entanglement is different — altitude, aircraft configuration, who is still aboard, what the jumper can or cannot do all change the calculus entirely.

The film apparently uses this scenario as a set piece rather than engaging with what it actually means. As someone who flies jump aircraft and has thought carefully about what this situation would require, I found this scene more unsettling than anything involving the supernatural elements — not because of how the film handled it, but because the underlying scenario doesn’t need any horror embellishment. It is already quite serious enough.

What the film gets right

The drop zone environment is recognisable to anyone who has spent time in one. The social dynamics between experienced jumpers feel accurate. The gear looks right. The manifest culture, the way people talk about jumps, the specific atmosphere of a community that has built an entire world around a shared activity — all of this reads as real because the people behind the camera lived it.

The aerial sequences are the film’s genuine achievement. There is a quality to well-shot freefall footage that is difficult to manufacture artificially, and HEX has it. The exits look like exits. The freefall looks like freefall. The formation work looks like actual formation work. Rotten Tomatoes, not usually a venue for precision, called it “stomach-churning aerial photography,” which is accurate and not entirely a criticism.

The first-act structure — loner meets group, group has a project, loner is invited in, bonds are formed — is recognisable from the social pattern of how skydiving communities actually recruit and integrate new members. The way Payson pursues Sarah’s inclusion in the formation has the specific flavour of how enthusiastic skydivers talk other enthusiastic skydivers into new projects. This is accurate in a way that clearly came from experience.

For a skydiver watching this film, these sequences provide a specific kind of satisfaction that non-skydivers won’t fully feel. Things are where they should be. People are doing what they should be doing. The jump looks like a jump.

Then someone’s bones spontaneously break and we’re back to the script.

What a real skydiving horror film would look like

Here is the thing about skydiving that the film misses entirely: it does not need supernatural assistance to be terrifying.

The actual horror of skydiving — for anyone who has spent enough time in the sport — is not demonic formations and vanishing jumpers. It is a reserve container that opens when it shouldn’t. An entanglement at 5,000 feet with ten people still in the aircraft. A malfunction at low altitude with insufficient height to resolve. An AAD that fires at the wrong moment. A line twist that won’t clear. A canopy collision on final approach.

These scenarios exist. They require no supernatural intervention. They are scarier than anything HEX imagines, partly because they are real and partly because when they happen there is no third-act resolution — just the outcome, whatever it is, and the paperwork afterward.

The film had 25,000 jumps worth of genuinely frightening material available to it and chose instead to have a man shoot himself in the face with a rifle. This is a creative decision I find difficult to fully explain.

The Payson problem

His name is Payson.

I want to make sure this is understood. The central male character, the person around whom the entire supernatural mystery is constructed, the man whose disappearance drives the plot — his name is Payson.

One reviewer suggested taking a drink every time a character says “Payson.” The reviewer noted you would be dead before the third act. This seems like an accurate assessment. The name appears continuously throughout the film with the insistence of someone who chose it deliberately and is committed to it, which makes it worse rather than better.

The pilot scene

There is a scene in which a female skydiver flashes her breasts at the pilot.

As someone who flies jump aircraft professionally, I want to address this directly: this does not happen. I am not saying it could not theoretically happen. I am saying that in the operational context of a jump flight, the pilot is managing airspeed, altitude, heading, engine temperatures, airspace, and the exit calculation simultaneously, and is not a relevant audience for this kind of interaction.

The scene is presumably intended to establish that this is a fun and irreverent drop zone with a loose culture. What it actually establishes is that the screenwriter has a specific imagination about what drop zones are like that doesn’t fully correspond to what drop zones are like.

In my years of jump flying, I have not encountered this scenario. I will update this review if that changes.

The verdict

HEX is not a good horror film. The mystery is not very mysterious, the deaths are not coherent, the resolution raises more questions than it answers, and the budget runs out visibly in the third act. Multiple reviews describe it as “Point Break meets Final Destination, confused.” This is accurate and not a compliment.

It is, however, a competent skydiving film wearing a horror film’s clothing and not entirely comfortable in it. The aerial sequences are worth watching. The drop zone atmosphere is worth experiencing for anyone curious about what the sport looks like from the inside. The first act, before the supernatural elements overwhelm the story, is genuinely interesting.

The film’s central failure is not budgetary. It’s that a production crew with 25,000 combined jumps hired a screenwriter who apparently watched some skydiving videos and then invented the rest. The gap between what the cameras show in the air — which is authentic — and what the script does on the ground — which is largely fantasy — is the defining characteristic of HEX.

If you have never skydived, HEX will show you something real about the culture and the experience of the sport, which is more than most films manage. If you are a skydiver, you will spend significant portions of the film nodding at the drop zone scenes and then looking slightly confused at everything else.

If you are both a skydiver and someone who cares about script coherence, you will have a complicated evening.

Available on Tubi, where it is free, which is the correct price point for a film of this specific profile. Watch the freefall sequences. Fast-forward through the apartments exploding. Form your own opinion about Payson.

Three out of five for the aerial footage. Two out of five for the rest. One out of five for the name Payson, whatever it means and wherever it came from.

Have you seen HEX? And more importantly — what would an actually good skydiving horror film look like?

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Most people assume they’re stuck. They’ll pay the change fee, take the travel credit, eat the cost, or spend an hour on hold with the airline begging for mercy.

Here’s what they don’t know: you can cancel that ticket for free and get your money back.

Not some airlines. Not if you’re lucky. Not if you have elite status or bought the expensive fare class. Most major airlines have a 24-hour cancellation window where you can back out of any ticket purchase for a full refund, no questions asked, no fees, no penalty.

This isn’t a hidden trick or a loophole that might get closed. For flights touching the United States, it’s a Department of Transportation regulation that’s been in effect since 2011. For flights that don’t involve the U.S. at all, many airlines offer it anyway as standard policy—though not always, and the details vary.

The weird part is how few people know about this. I’ve watched travelers pay €200 change fees to fix a typo they made ten minutes after booking. I’ve seen people abandon tickets entirely rather than deal with customer service. Meanwhile the rule that would have saved them is right there in the airline’s terms and conditions, unused.

So here’s how it actually works, what the gotchas are, and how to use it for more than just fixing mistakes.

The Basic Rule

If you book a ticket that touches the United States—departing from, arriving in, or operated by a U.S. carrier—you can cancel within 24 hours of purchase for a full refund as long as you booked at least seven days before departure.

That seven-day buffer matters. If your flight leaves in five days, the 24-hour cancellation window doesn’t apply. The airline can still charge you their normal cancellation fees. This restriction exists to prevent people from booking refundable tickets as free holds for last-minute travel.

For flights that don’t involve the U.S. at all—say, Warsaw to Barcelona on a European carrier—the rule depends on the airline. Many offer 24-hour cancellation anyway because it’s become an industry standard, but they’re not legally required to. Ryanair doesn’t. Wizz Air doesn’t. Lufthansa does. British Airways does. You have to check the specific carrier’s policy.

The refund goes back to your original payment method—credit card, debit card, whatever you used. Not travel credit. Not a voucher. Actual money returned to your account. Processing time varies by airline but typically shows up within a week.

Which airlines? Major European carriers—Lufthansa, Air France, KLM, British Airways, Iberia, SAS—generally honor 24-hour cancellation on all routes, not just U.S.-bound ones. Legacy carriers worldwide—Emirates, Qatar, Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific—typically do the same. Low-cost carriers are hit or miss. Ryanair and Wizz Air explicitly don’t offer it. EasyJet offers it on some fare types but not others.

The clock starts when you complete the purchase, not when you receive the confirmation email. If you book at 15:47 on Monday, you have until 15:47 on Tuesday. Time zones matter—it’s 24 hours in whatever time zone you were in when you booked, though some airlines use UTC to avoid confusion.

You can cancel online through the airline’s website or app. You don’t need to call. In fact, calling is usually slower because you’ll wait on hold and then the agent will just process the same cancellation you could have done yourself in two minutes.

The Gotchas

The rule sounds simple but airlines have carved out exceptions that can catch you if you’re not paying attention.

First, the seven-day rule applies primarily to U.S.-regulated tickets. For flights that don’t touch the U.S., some airlines don’t apply this restriction—you might be able to cancel within 24 hours even if the flight is tomorrow. Others apply it anyway. Check the specific airline.

Second, some airlines interpret “24 hours” differently. Most use 24 hours from the time of purchase. A few use “by midnight the next day,” which could give you more or less time depending on when you booked. Lufthansa, for example, uses calendar days for some fare types—book Monday morning, cancel by Tuesday midnight.

Third, the cheapest fare classes are often excluded. Ryanair doesn’t offer free cancellation at all. Wizz Air doesn’t. EasyJet allows it on standard fares but not on their lowest price tier. Even full-service carriers sometimes exclude basic economy or light fares from the 24-hour rule—you can still cancel, but you’ll get a voucher instead of a refund.

Fourth, tickets booked through third-party sites—Kiwi, eDreams, Opodo—may not honor the 24-hour rule the same way. Technically the airline still has to comply with their own cancellation policy, but good luck navigating that through a third-party booking platform. If you want the clean 24-hour cancellation option, book directly with the airline.

Fifth, award tickets and tickets booked with miles usually follow different rules. Most airlines let you cancel award bookings within 24 hours and get your miles back, but some charge a redeposit fee even within the window. British Airways Executive Club, for instance, charges £35 to redeposit miles even if you cancel immediately.

Sixth, if you booked multiple passengers on one reservation, you usually have to cancel everyone or no one. You can’t cancel one passenger and keep the rest. Some airlines allow partial cancellations but it’s not guaranteed.

Seventh, package bookings—flight plus hotel, flight plus car—often don’t qualify. The 24-hour rule typically applies to standalone flight tickets. If you booked a package through a tour operator or even through the airline’s own vacation packages division, different cancellation terms apply.

How to Actually Cancel

Most airlines bury the cancellation option just enough that you’ll spend five minutes looking for it, but not so much that you’ll give up and call.

Log into the airline’s website or app. Find “Manage Booking” or “My Trips” or whatever they’re calling it. Enter your booking reference and last name. Pull up the booking.

Look for “Cancel Flight” or “Cancel Reservation.” It’s usually near the bottom of the trip details page, sometimes in a dropdown menu under “Change/Cancel.” Do not look for “Refund” because that’s often a different process for tickets that are already canceled.

Click cancel. The system will show you a summary of what you’re canceling and confirm that you’ll get a refund. It should explicitly say “refund to original form of payment” if you’re within the 24-hour window. If it says “travel credit” or “voucher,” stop—something is wrong and you’re outside the window or booked a fare that doesn’t qualify.

Confirm the cancellation. You’ll get an email confirmation. Save it. Check your credit card in a few days to make sure the refund posts.

If the website won’t let you cancel online—which happens sometimes with complex itineraries or partner airline bookings—then you have to call. Have your booking reference ready. Say “I need to cancel this reservation within the 24-hour window for a full refund.” Do not get talked into a travel credit if you’re within the window and the airline’s policy says you’re entitled to a refund.

For European carriers, if you’re calling from outside your home country, look for local-rate phone numbers rather than premium-rate customer service lines. Some airlines charge €2-3 per minute for phone support, which adds insult to injury when you’re trying to exercise a right to free cancellation.

Using It Strategically

Most people think of the 24-hour cancellation rule as insurance against mistakes. You fat-fingered the dates, you misspelled a name, you booked the wrong airport. Fine. But the rule is more useful than that.

You can use it as a free hold while you figure out the rest of your trip. Flights are often the first thing people book because prices change and availability disappears. But maybe you haven’t confirmed your accommodation yet, or you’re waiting to hear if you can get time off work, or you’re coordinating with other people who haven’t decided.

Book the flight now. Lock in the price. You have 24 hours to sort out everything else. If it doesn’t come together, cancel for free. If it does, you’re done.

This is especially useful when you see a fare that’s unusually low and you’re pretty sure it won’t last. Mistake fares, flash sales, random price drops—they disappear fast. If you wait to book until you’ve confirmed every detail of your trip, the fare is gone. Book it now, decide later.

You can also use it to compare options without committing. Book two different flights on two different airlines. Spend a few hours comparing total trip cost, connection times, schedule convenience. Cancel the one you don’t want within 24 hours. Keep the better option.

Or use it to buy yourself negotiating time. If you’re booking a group trip and people are still arguing about dates, book the flights everyone is leaning toward. If the group changes their mind in the next day, cancel and rebook. If not, you’re set.

The risk is that prices change during your 24-hour window. If you cancel a ticket and then try to rebook the same flight an hour later, the price might be higher. Airlines adjust fares constantly based on demand and inventory. So if you’re using the 24-hour window as a hold, check prices before you cancel. If the fare has jumped significantly, you might want to keep what you have even if your plans aren’t final.

Also, if you’re booking a flight that’s close to selling out, canceling might mean losing your seat entirely. The flight could be full by the time you try to rebook. If you’re looking at “3 seats left at this price,” don’t count on still having that option after you cancel.

Regional Differences Worth Knowing

The 24-hour rule originated in the United States but has spread unevenly around the world.

In Europe, there’s no EU-wide regulation requiring 24-hour free cancellation. European passenger rights focus on delays, cancellations, and denied boarding—not on giving you a cooling-off period after booking. So whether you get 24-hour cancellation on an intra-Europe flight depends entirely on the airline’s own policy.

Legacy carriers generally offer it. Low-cost carriers generally don’t, though there are exceptions. Vueling offers 24-hour cancellation. Wizz Air and Ryanair don’t.

In the UK, distance selling regulations theoretically give you 14 days to cancel most online purchases, but airlines successfully argued that flights are exempt because they’re time-sensitive services. So UK-based airlines follow the same airline-specific policies as everyone else.

In Asia, the situation is similar. Full-service carriers like Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, ANA, and JAL offer 24-hour cancellation. Low-cost carriers like AirAsia, Scoot, and Jetstar often don’t.

In the Middle East, the big three—Emirates, Qatar, Etihad—all honor 24-hour cancellation globally.

In Latin America and Africa, it’s airline-by-line. LATAM does. Avianca does. South African Airways does. Many regional carriers don’t.

The safest assumption: if you’re booking a flight that touches the U.S., you’re covered by the DOT rule. If you’re not, check the airline’s specific cancellation policy before assuming you have 24 hours.

What It’s Not Good For

The 24-hour rule doesn’t solve every travel booking problem.

It doesn’t help if you realize three days after booking that you need to change your trip. At that point you’re into normal change fees and fare differences.

It doesn’t help if your flight is in six days and you just booked it yesterday, because the seven-day advance purchase requirement (where it applies) means the 24-hour rule doesn’t apply.

It doesn’t help if you’re trying to get a refund on a flight you already took, or a flight that already departed, or a no-show situation. The 24-hour window is for canceling before travel, not after.

It doesn’t help if you booked through a third party that has its own cancellation rules and won’t process a refund even though the airline technically offers one.

It doesn’t help if you’re trying to change your ticket rather than cancel it. The 24-hour rule is cancel-and-refund, not free changes. If you want to change your flight within 24 hours, you’ll probably still pay a change fee and any fare difference unless you cancel the old ticket and book a new one—and then you’re gambling that the new flight is still available at the price you want.

It doesn’t help if you booked the absolute cheapest fare on a low-cost carrier that explicitly excludes this option. Ryanair’s €9.99 fare to Mallorca? No 24-hour cancellation. You’re locked in the moment you click purchase.

Why Airlines Don’t Advertise This

You’d think airlines would promote a customer-friendly policy that makes people more comfortable booking. They don’t.

Some airlines mention it in fine print during checkout—”You can cancel within 24 hours for a full refund”—but it’s buried among a dozen other notifications and disclosures that nobody reads.

Most airlines don’t mention it at all unless you go looking in their terms and conditions.

Why? Because the more people who know about it, the more people who use it. And the more people who use it, the more uncertainty airlines have about whether a booking will stick.

Airlines make money when people book tickets and don’t cancel them. They plan loads, set prices, sell connecting inventory, all based on the assumption that most bookings are real commitments. If everyone started using the 24-hour window as a free hold, it would create operational headaches.

So they comply with the policy—where they’re required to or where they’ve chosen to adopt it—but they don’t go out of their way to remind you it exists.

Which is why, more than a decade after the U.S. regulation went into effect and years after it became standard practice at major carriers worldwide, you still see travelers paying hundreds of euros in change fees to fix mistakes they made yesterday, unaware they had a free out.

When to Use It and When Not To

Use the 24-hour cancellation rule if:

You made a booking error—wrong dates, wrong airport, name misspelled beyond what the airline will accept, wrong passenger entirely.

You found a better option within a few hours and want to switch without penalty.

You saw a great fare but your plans aren’t final and you want to lock it in while you sort out details.

You’re comparing options and want to hold multiple bookings briefly before deciding.

You’re coordinating with other people who haven’t confirmed yet and you want to secure the fare in case it goes up.

Don’t use it if:

You’re booking a low-cost carrier that explicitly doesn’t offer it—check before assuming.

Your flight is less than seven days away and you’re booking a U.S.-regulated ticket where the rule may not apply.

You booked the cheapest possible fare class and haven’t verified whether it’s eligible.

You booked through a third party and don’t want to fight with their customer service.

You’re close to the 24-hour mark and not confident you can complete the cancellation before the window closes.

The flight is nearly full and you might lose your seat entirely if you cancel.

You’re trying to change a ticket rather than cancel and rebook, because changes usually still cost money.

What You're Actually Getting

The 24-hour cancellation rule is one of the few genuinely passenger-friendly policies in air travel. Where it applies, it works. Airlines that offer it have to honor it.

Most people don’t use it because they don’t know it exists, or they assume there’s a catch, or they think it only applies to expensive tickets or elite members.

There’s no catch beyond the seven-day advance purchase rule on U.S. flights, the fare class exclusions on some carriers, and the fact that not every airline offers it in the first place. Where it does apply, you don’t need status. You don’t need to buy a premium fare. You just need to cancel within 24 hours.

So next time you book a flight and immediately realize you made a mistake, or next time you find a great fare but your plans aren’t solid yet—don’t panic. Check if the airline offers 24-hour cancellation. If they do, you have 24 hours. Use them.

Have you ever used the 24-hour cancellation window? Did you know it existed before you needed it, or did you discover it by accident after making a booking mistake?

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This is a universal airport experience. You know you’re being overcharged. You pay anyway. You complain to whoever you’re traveling with. Then you do it again next trip.

Everyone assumes this is just how airports work. Captive audience, monopoly pricing, no alternatives. The cost of travel.

Except it isn’t. At least one major airport has proven you can charge street prices for airport food and actually make more money doing it. Which raises an uncomfortable question: if fair pricing works better for everyone including the airport, why doesn’t everyone do it?

I’m not an airport concessions expert. I’m a lawyer and pilot who spends too much time in airports and got curious about why a bottle of water costs four times what it should. So I looked into it.

What I found is more interesting than “they charge more because they can.”

The obvious explanation

The simple answer is supply and demand. You’re past security. You can’t leave. You need food or water or coffee. There are limited vendors and they know you have no choice.

This is true. But it’s incomplete.

If pure monopoly pricing were the only factor, airports could charge whatever they wanted. €50 sandwiches. €20 bottles of water. Why stop at double or triple street prices?

The reason they don’t is that most airports have pricing policies. They’re supposed to limit how much vendors can charge. The standard is “street pricing plus 10-15%” — meaning airport prices shouldn’t exceed street prices by more than that margin.

In practice, these policies are either poorly enforced or creatively interpreted. But they exist, which means someone recognized that unlimited price gouging would be bad for business.

So if it’s not just greed and there are supposed to be price controls, why is airport food still so expensive?

The real costs nobody sees

I spoke with operators and looked at publicly available data on airport concession costs. The numbers are genuinely surprising.

Start with rent. Commercial retail space in most cities runs €20-40 per square meter per year. Airport retail space is typically double that or more. Portland International Airport in the United States charges a minimum of $80 per square foot annually (about €770 per square meter), which is more than double the local commercial rate.

But that’s just the base rent. Airports also take a percentage of gross sales — typically 10-18%. So the more you sell, the more rent you pay. This is the opposite of how street retail works, where higher sales mean better margins.

Then there’s security. Every delivery has to go through screening. Every employee needs specialized badges that can take weeks to obtain. Staff have to arrive early to clear security before their shifts. Many airports charge employees for parking.

Suppliers know this. When a food wholesaler learns you’re operating in an airport, prices go up. They assume you’re making huge margins and they want a cut. An airport restaurant pays more for the same ingredients than a street location of the same chain.

Labor costs are higher. Many airport jobs are unionized and pay €2-3 more per hour than comparable positions outside. Turnover is high because the job involves long hours in a secured environment with the hassle of daily security screening.

Construction and maintenance run 30-40% higher than comparable street projects because of airport security requirements and restricted access.

Add it all up and the cost structure is genuinely different. An airport vendor really does have higher expenses than a street vendor.

But here’s the thing: these costs justify maybe a 20-30% markup. Not 100%. Not 200%.

The street pricing lie

Most major airports claim to enforce “street pricing plus 10-15%” policies. I wanted to see if this was real.

The best data comes from the United States, where local news investigations have actually audited airport prices against stated policies. European airports don’t face the same public scrutiny, but there’s no reason to think they’re different.

A 2026 investigation at Denver International Airport checked over 80 items across multiple vendors. The airport’s policy allowed a maximum 15% markup over comparable street prices.

73% of items violated the policy.

McDonald’s coffee sold for $3.02 in the airport versus $1.49 at the nearest street location — a 102% markup. Soft drinks were marked up 114%. A Big Mac meal was 24% over the limit.

At Minneapolis-St. Paul, which claims “street pricing plus 10%,” investigators found a yogurt marked up 84% and a convenience store charging 69% more than a nearby Walgreens.

LaGuardia Airport in New York became infamous when a passenger posted a photo of a $27 Sam Adams beer. The airport’s response was to issue new guidelines. The beer price dropped to $11 — still expensive, but less obscene.

The problem is enforcement. Airports audit prices maybe twice a year. Vendors know this. Even when violations are documented publicly, consequences are rare.

The other problem is defining “street price.” The policies say vendors should compare to “nearby” locations. But nearby is ambiguous. Vendors submit three comparison prices from metro-area locations and average them. If you include an expensive tourist area or downtown location alongside a suburban strip mall, the average goes up and you can justify higher airport pricing.

It’s creative compliance. Technically following the rules while completely defeating their purpose.

European airports are worse because most don’t even pretend to have enforceable pricing policies. You pay what they charge and that’s it.

The exception that proves the system is broken

Portland International Airport in Oregon does something different.

They enforce actual street pricing. No markup. Zero.

If a McDonald’s burger costs $5.50 on the street in Portland, it costs $5.50 at the airport. If a restaurant has happy hour pricing from 4-6 PM at its street location, the airport location has the same happy hour.

This seems insane from a revenue perspective. Airports make significant income from concession fees. Why would you voluntarily limit what vendors can charge and therefore what the airport earns in percentage rent?

Here’s what actually happened: passenger satisfaction scores went up. Portland ranks in the top 10 for customer satisfaction among large airports three of the last four years.

Revenue went up. When passengers know they’re not being gouged on food, they spend more on retail. They buy gifts. They make impulse purchases. Total spend per passenger is higher than the national average.

Vendor performance went up. Restaurants report better sales volumes because passengers aren’t avoiding airport food out of principle.

Chris Czarnecki, director of aviation business for the Port of Portland, put it simply: “When you know that you’re paying street prices for food and beverage, you’re more willing to go buy a gift for somebody on your trip.”

The model works. Everyone benefits. The airport makes more money. Vendors get higher volume. Passengers aren’t angry.

So why doesn’t every airport do this?

Why the better system won’t spread

The obvious reason is inertia. Airports have long-term contracts with concession operators. Switching to a new model means renegotiating deals that run 10-15 years.

The real reason is that the current system works for the people who designed it.

Six large corporations run the majority of airport food and retail in the United States. Names most passengers don’t recognize. These companies operate thousands of locations globally. In many terminals, multiple branded outlets — different restaurant names, different storefronts — are owned by the same parent company.

This creates the illusion of competition without actual competition.

These large operators have pushed airports to raise or eliminate pricing caps. Phoenix Sky Harbor abandoned street pricing in 2019 after concession companies lobbied for higher limits. Los Angeles International removed most pricing restrictions.

The operators argue that airport costs are so high they can’t make reasonable profit under street pricing. Portland’s success suggests this isn’t true, but Portland is a single data point and the industry has ignored it.

European airports face even less pressure to change. Consumer protection is theoretically stronger in the EU, but airport concessions fall into a regulatory gap. They’re private businesses operating on quasi-public infrastructure. Nobody’s quite sure who should regulate them or how.

The result is a system that works exactly as designed — for airports and concessionaires. Passengers are the product, not the customer.

What European airports aren’t telling you

I fly frequently between Poland and Western Europe. The pricing is consistently absurd.

Frankfurt Airport: €4.50 for a bottle of water you can buy in any German supermarket for €0.50.

Amsterdam Schiphol: €8 for a small coffee that would cost €2.50 in central Amsterdam.

Paris Charles de Gaulle: €6.50 for a croissant you’d pay €1.50 for at any Parisian bakery.

The justification is always the same: higher costs, security requirements, logistical complexity. And those costs are real. But they don’t explain a 600% markup on bottled water.

European airports don’t even pretend to have enforceable pricing policies like American airports do. The assumption is that passengers will pay whatever is charged because they have no alternative.

This assumption is correct. Which is why nothing changes.

The European Commission investigated airport charges in 2018 and concluded that transparency was lacking but stopped short of recommending price controls. National regulators haven’t stepped in. Airport authorities have no incentive to limit their own revenue.

So we’re left with a system where passengers know they’re being overcharged, airports know that passengers know, and everyone shrugs because what are you going to do, not eat?

The oligopoly you didn’t notice

Here’s something most passengers don’t realize: that “variety” of food options in your terminal is mostly fake.

Walk through any major European airport and you’ll see multiple restaurants. Different brands, different cuisines, different price points. It looks like competition.

Except many of them are owned by the same parent company.

A few large firms — SSP Group, Autogrill, HMSHost, Lagardère Travel Retail — operate the majority of airport food and retail globally. SSP alone runs over 2,800 locations across 36 countries.

You think you’re choosing between Italian, Asian, and a coffee shop. You’re actually choosing between three outlets of the same conglomerate.

This matters because real competition would drive prices down. If five independent operators were competing for your business in the same terminal, they’d undercut each other. But when the same company owns all five, there’s no incentive to compete on price.

Airport authorities know this. They’re the ones who award concession contracts. They could require true diversity of operators. They don’t, because large operators are easier to manage and generate more reliable revenue.

The result is that passengers face the illusion of choice in a market with no meaningful competition.

What you can actually do about it

The structural problems aren’t going to be fixed anytime soon. But individual passengers aren’t completely powerless.

Bring food through security. Solid foods are allowed. Sandwiches, fruit, nuts, granola bars — all fine. You can pack an entire meal if you want. This is the most effective way to avoid airport pricing entirely.

Bring an empty water bottle. Fill it at a fountain after security. A reusable bottle pays for itself in two trips. Airport water fountains are required by regulation. They’re free. Use them.

Eat before you arrive. If you’re not flying early morning, eat a full meal before heading to the airport. This gives you more flexibility to skip overpriced airport food.

Credit card lounge access. Many premium travel credit cards include airport lounge access. Lounges have free food and drinks. If you fly frequently enough, the annual fee pays for itself in saved airport meal costs.

Document egregious pricing. Take photos of obviously inflated prices and post them on social media tagging the airport. Public shaming occasionally works. The LaGuardia $27 beer only got fixed after going viral.

Choose your airport. If you have options, some airports are noticeably better than others. Research before booking.

The reality is that none of these solve the fundamental problem. You’re working around a broken system rather than fixing it.

Why this matters beyond your wallet

Airport pricing feels like a minor annoyance. You pay too much for a sandwich, you complain, you move on.

But it’s a symptom of a larger issue: when infrastructure operates as private profit centers, the public interest gets sacrificed.

Airports are essential infrastructure. You can’t opt out of flying if you need to travel long distances. Once you’re past security, you can’t leave. This creates conditions where normal market dynamics don’t work.

In a functional market, if prices are too high, customers go elsewhere and competition brings prices down. In airports, customers are captive and competition is artificially limited.

The Portland model proves this doesn’t have to be extractive. You can run airport concessions at street prices, keep passengers happy, and still generate good revenue.

The fact that almost no other airport has adopted this model tells you everything about whose interests the current system serves.

It’s not travelers. It’s not even vendors, who would likely prefer higher volumes at reasonable margins over lower volumes at inflated margins.

It’s airport authorities and large concession operators who benefit from the status quo and have no reason to change it.

The system is working exactly as designed

Every time you pay €13 for an airport sandwich, you’re participating in a system that everyone involved knows is exploitative.

The airport knows. The vendor knows. You know.

It happens anyway because the incentives are aligned for everyone except passengers.

Airports maximize non-aeronautical revenue. Concession operators maintain high margins. Large corporations consolidate market share.

Passengers pay more than they should and accept it as the cost of travel.

Portland International demonstrated that a better system is possible. Fair pricing, higher satisfaction, better revenue. Everyone wins.

The fact that nobody has copied this model in nearly two decades tells you it was never about whether fair pricing could work.

It was always about whether anyone with the power to change things wanted it to work.

They don’t.

So next time you’re paying €6 for bottled water at an airport, remember: this isn’t an unfortunate necessity of airport operations.

It’s a choice.

Just not your choice.

Do you pack your own food for flights, or have you given up and accepted airport pricing as inevitable?

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They’re lying because the truth would send half the students home before they ever got on the plane.

Here’s what I mean: your instructor tells you that if you arch hard, maintain altitude awareness, and deploy at 5,000 feet, you’ll have a great first jump. Technically true. But they don’t tell you that you’ll probably forget to arch the second you exit, that altitude awareness goes out the window when you’re in sensory overload, and that “maintaining heading” means approximately pointing in the same hemisphere as your instructors while flailing.

They don’t tell you this because ground school is already overwhelming. You’ve spent eight hours learning hand signals, emergency procedures, body position, canopy control, and landing patterns. Your brain is full. Adding “and by the way, you’ll probably do all of this wrong and that’s completely normal” doesn’t help.

But here’s what does help: knowing what a first jump actually looks like when it goes well, what real problems look like versus normal chaos, and when to trust your instructors versus when to trust your gut.

I'm a “fresh” AFF instructor, meaning that my experience does not qualify me to be the expert voice. I've done some jumps with students, but nearly not enough to experience all (who did though?). More than that, I've watched and listened to instructors who've been doing this for years. There are things they know—things we all know—that don't make it into ground school. Not because we're hiding anything important, but because saying it beforehand wouldn't help. Here's some of it.

What A “Good” First Jump Actually Looks Like

Students think a good first jump means perfect body position, stable freefall, smooth deployment, and a textbook landing. That’s not a good first jump. That’s a unicorn that happens maybe once every hundred students.

A good first jump means: you exited the aircraft, you didn’t pass out or had a panic attack, your instructors kept you stable enough to pull, you pulled at approximately the right altitude, your parachute opened, and you contacted ground (which is a necessary component but not full definition of landing).

That’s it. That’s the bar.

Everything else—the arch, the heading, the altitude checks, the smooth turns under canopy—is bonus. If you manage any of that on jump one, great. If you don’t, you’re completely normal.

Here’s what actually happens on most first jumps:

You exit the aircraft and (90% of the time) immediately lose all body awareness. Your instructors told you to arch. You are not arching. You’re doing some approximation of a position that might be called an arch if you’re generous, but mostly you’re just existing in space while your brain tries to process that you’re falling.

Your instructors are holding you. You probably don’t notice this because you’re overwhelmed, but they’re doing a lot of work keeping you stable. That perfect freefall you’re experiencing? Thirty percent you, seventy percent them.

Altitude awareness disappears. You practiced checking your altimeter every five seconds in ground school. In freefall, you’ll check it maybe twice if you remember at all. Your instructors will tap altimeter, sometimes repeatedly. You’ll look at it and see numbers but not process what they mean.

Sometimes, you pull at the right altitude because your instructor shakes you to pull, not because you made an independent decision based on altitude awareness. This is fine. This is what instructors are for.

Your parachute opens. This is the first moment you’ll actually think clearly since leaving the aircraft. Suddenly everything is quiet and you can breathe and you realize you just fell out of a plane and you’re still alive.

You try to remember the canopy procedures from ground school. You manage maybe half of them. You definitely forget to do your controllability check in the right order. You turn when you’re supposed to turn, mostly because your radio is telling you to turn.

You land. Maybe you flare at the right altitude. Maybe you don’t and you do a feet-down arrival that’s harder than it should be but you stay upright. Maybe you fall over. Doesn’t matter. You’re on the ground and nothing is broken.

Your instructors tell you that you did great. You did. Not because your skydive was technically proficient, but because you got through it and you’re safe and you’re ready to do it again.

This is a good first jump.

Why Everyone Says "That Was Amazing" Even If They're Not Sure It Was

Here’s something instructors notice: a lot of first-time students land and say “that was amazing” when what they actually mean is “that was so overwhelming I’m not sure what just happened.”

Not that they hated it. Most students genuinely want to go again. But that first jump goes by so fast that your brain doesn’t have time to process what’s happening. You’re trying to remember procedures while falling, managing sensory overload, responding to instructor signals, and then suddenly you’re under canopy and it’s over.

When you land, people ask “how was it?” You say “amazing” because it was definitely something, and “amazing” is easier than explaining that you have no idea what you just experienced.

Then you watch the video and realize half the things you thought happened didn’t happen that way. You were convinced you arched perfectly - the video shows you flopping around. You thought you pulled smoothly - it looks frantic. You remember freefall lasting forever - it was forty-five seconds.

This is completely normal. First jumps are too fast and too overwhelming to fully experience while they’re happening. Your brain is in survival mode, not experience-savoring mode.

The second jump is when you actually start experiencing skydiving instead of just surviving it. Your brain knows what’s coming. You’re not spending the entire freefall trying to remember what you’re supposed to be doing. You can actually notice what falling feels like, what the view looks like, what your body is doing.

Some students don’t come back after jump one, but usually it’s not because they hated it. It’s because life happens - it’s expensive, it’s time-consuming, the weather did not allow for it, the dropzone is far away, they got what they wanted from one jump. That’s fine. Not everyone needs to become a skydiver.

But if you land from jump one thinking “that was... something? I think?” - that’s not a sign you didn’t like it. That’s a sign you need jump two to figure out what jump one actually was.

The Difference Between Normal Fear and Something-Is-Wrong Fear

Every first-time student is scared. Jumping out of an aircraft goes against every survival instinct evolution gave you. Fear is not just normal—it’s appropriate.

But there’s a difference between normal fear and something-is-wrong fear, and students often can’t tell which one they’re feeling.

Normal fear feels like: I’m about to do something dangerous and my body is responding appropriately. My heart is racing. My hands are shaking. I’m questioning my life choices. But underneath all of that, I still want to do this.

Normal fear gets worse as you approach the door, peaks right before exit, and starts to fade once you’re in freefall. It’s sharp and immediate but it doesn’t linger.

Something-is-wrong fear feels different. It’s a deep wrongness that doesn’t go away. It’s not “this is scary but I want to do it” but “everything in me is saying don’t do this.” It often gets worse, not better, as the jump approaches.

Something-is-wrong fear might mean: you’re genuinely not ready for this. Your training didn’t click. You don’t trust your instructor. You’re doing this for someone else’s reasons, not your own. You have an unaddressed medical issue that’s making this dangerous. You’re so anxious you won’t be able to respond to emergencies.

Here’s what instructors wish students knew: if you’re feeling something-is-wrong fear, tell us. We’d rather you back out on the ground than freeze in the door or panic in freefall.

Students worry that backing out makes them look weak or wastes everyone’s time. It doesn’t. Instructors would much rather have a student say “I’m not ready” than force themselves through a jump they’re not prepared for.

But here’s the tricky part: most students can’t tell the difference between the two types of fear. Everything feels overwhelming when you’re about to jump out of a plane for the first time.

So how do you know?

Ask yourself: underneath the fear, do I actually want to do this? If the answer is yes—even a qualified, uncertain yes—that’s probably normal fear. If the answer is “no, I’m only here because my friends signed me up” or “no, but I’ll feel like a coward if I don’t,” that’s worth examining.

Also: trust your instructors to read you. They’ve seen hundreds of scared students. They can usually tell the difference between normal fear and genuine unreadiness. If your instructor thinks you’re not ready, they’ll tell you. If they’re moving forward with the jump, they believe you can do this.

What Happens If You Freeze in the Door (Spoiler: Nothing Terrible)

Students’ biggest fear—after “what if my parachute doesn’t open”—is freezing in the door.

They imagine themselves getting to the exit, being unable to move, holding up the entire plane while everyone watches them fail, and being dragged back inside in shame.

Here’s what actually happens if you freeze:

Your instructors give you a moment. Maybe two-three seconds. They’re checking: is this temporary hesitation or genuine inability to jump?

If it’s hesitation, they’ll coach you through it. “Look at me. Deep breath. Ready? Check in, check out, three, four, go.” Most students who hesitate for a few seconds end up jumping.

If you genuinely can’t move, your instructors will pull you back from the door, make room for the next group to exit, and talk to you after the plane lands.

That’s it. No drama. No forcing you out. No judgment from other jumpers because everyone on that plane has either been scared themselves or understands that some people aren’t ready. The pilot might give you a look - he was expecting to descend with an empty plane and now he needs to take care of people on board - but pilots judge everyone for everything anyway.

What doesn’t happen: you don’t get pushed out against your will. Instructors are not going to manhandle you through the door if you’re genuinely frozen. That’s dangerous and counterproductive and we don’t do it.

You don’t ruin everyone else’s jump. The plane keeps moving. Other jumpers exit. The world continues.

You don’t lose your money. Most dropzones will let you try again later or refund (at least part of the cost) if you decide you’re done.

Here’s what instructors actually think when a student freezes: this person is having a strong fear response and that’s normal. We’ll give them space to work through it or we’ll help them get off the plane safely.

What we don’t think: this person is weak or cowardly or wasting our time.

Freezing happens. Usually it’s temporary. Sometimes it’s not. Either way, it’s not the catastrophe students imagine it to be.

When To Actually Be Concerned Versus When It’s Just First-Jump Chaos

Students often can’t tell the difference between normal first-jump chaos and actual problems. Here’s how to tell which is which.

Normal chaos:

You have no idea what your body is doing in freefall. You think you’re arching but you’re probably not. You’re trying to maintain heading but you’re spinning slowly. Your instructors are giving you hand signals and you’re seeing them but not processing what they mean fast enough.

This is fine. This is what first jumps look like. Your instructors are compensating. You’ll get better.

You forget half the procedures from ground school. You don’t do your controllability check in the right order. You turn the wrong direction at first. You forget to locate the dropzone until your instructor radios you.

This is fine. Canopy operations under stress are hard. You’ll remember more on jump two.

Your landing is rough. You flare too high or too low. You do a feet-down arrival instead of a slide-in. You fall over.

This is fine as long as you’re not injured. Landing is a skill that takes practice. Your first one probably won’t be pretty.

Actual problems:

You pulled and nothing happened. You waited. You pulled your reserve. This is an emergency but it’s what you’re trained for and what your equipment is designed for. Your AAD will fire if you don’t get the reserve out in time. This is why we have backup systems.

You’re under canopy and something is seriously wrong—same thing. Go right-left, as you practiced. This is what the training was for.

You’re hurt. You landed hard and something is injured. Raise your hand, or tell your instructors immediately. Don’t try to walk it off. We need to know.

You’re having a genuine medical emergency—difficulty breathing, chest pain, extreme dizziness that doesn’t go away. Tell someone right away.

Here’s the key difference: normal chaos is overwhelming but manageable. You feel like you’re doing everything wrong but you’re still falling at the right speed in approximately the right direction and your parachute opens and you land.

Actual problems are usually obvious—something is mechanically wrong or you’re physically hurt. If you’re wondering “is this normal,” it’s probably normal chaos. If something is clearly broken or you’re clearly injured, that’s a problem.

Your instructors are watching for problems the entire jump. If something serious is wrong, they’ll intervene. If they’re giving you signals to arch more or check your altitude, that’s normal coaching, not emergency intervention.

The Post-Jump Debrief Is More Important Than The Jump

Here’s something students don’t expect: the debrief matters more than the jump itself.

The jump is about getting you safely through the experience. The debrief is about understanding what happened so you can improve on jump two.

Most students spend the debrief nodding along while thinking “I have no idea what I did wrong because everything was chaos.” This is normal but unhelpful.

Here’s what to actually focus on in the debrief:

Ask specific questions about specific moments. Not “how did I do” but “when you signaled me to check my altitude, why didn’t I respond faster?” Not “what should I work on” but “what was happening when I started spinning left?”

Admit what you don’t remember. Instructors can’t help you improve if you pretend you remember things you don’t. If the debrief mentions something and you have zero recollection, say so. We’ll explain what happened and why.

Focus on one thing for jump two. You can’t fix everything at once. Most likely the instructor will tell you to pick one skill—maintaining heading, better altitude awareness, smoother pulls—and work on that. Everything else will come with time.

Watch your video if they recorded it. You’ll see things you didn’t realize were happening. You’ll understand why your instructor kept signaling you to arch. You’ll see that you were spinning when you thought you were stable.

Ask about the stuff that scared you. If something felt wrong or dangerous during the jump, ask about it. Often what felt like an emergency was actually normal. Knowing that helps for next time.

Instructors are trying to be encouraging in the debrief because we want you to come back for jump two. But we’re also trying to give you useful information. Don’t just hear “you did great” and move on. Dig into what actually happened.

What Success Actually Means

Your first AFF jump is not about being good at skydiving. It’s about getting through the experience without injury and learning enough to be slightly better on jump two. That’s it.

You’re not supposed to nail every skill. You’re not supposed to remember everything from ground school. You’re not supposed to feel confident and controlled throughout. You’re supposed to survive, learn, and be willing to try again.

If you did those three things, your first jump was a success—regardless of how stable you were, how well you pulled, or how gracefully you landed.

Skydiving is a progression. Jump one is likely chaos. Jump two is slightly less chaos. By jump seven, you might actually know what you’re doing. By jump twenty-five, you’ll look back at jump one and realize how far you’ve come.

But none of that happens if you quit after jump one because you thought you were supposed to be perfect and you weren’t.

So here’s what your instructor won’t say but should: your first jump probably won’t feel amazing. You’ll probably mess up multiple things. You’ll probably wonder why people do this for fun. That’s all normal.

Give it one more jump before you decide. You might hate jump two as much as jump one, and that’s fine—you tried, it’s not for you, move on. But you might discover that jump two is completely different because your brain knows what’s coming and can actually process the experience.

Either way, you’ll know for sure. And that’s worth more than a perfect first jump you were never going to have anyway.

Have you done your first AFF jump? What did your instructor tell you that turned out to be accurate? What do you wish someone had mentioned before you got on the plane?

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The comments were predictable. Jokes about cramped seats. Stories about missed connections. Someone shared a photo of duct tape on a seat. Another recounted being charged for printing a boarding pass. The usual Spirit horror stories.

What nobody mentioned: 34 years. Every flight. Zero fatalities.

The airline everyone loved to mock had a perfect safety record. And now it’s gone.

Spirit Airlines ceased operations at 3:00 AM Eastern on May 2, 2026, after talks for a $500 million government bailout fell apart. All flights canceled. Customer service shut down. Yellow kiosks at airports from Fort Lauderdale to Las Vegas displayed the same message: “We regret to inform you that Spirit Airlines has ceased global operations.”

17,000 employees lost their jobs overnight. Thousands of passengers were stranded mid-trip. A Spirit captain named Jon Jackson was scheduled to fly his retirement flight Saturday morning. The airline shut down before he could.

This is the first major U.S. airline to completely shut down since Midway Airlines collapsed immediately after September 11, 2001. And unlike previous airline failures — bankruptcies that led to mergers or restructuring — Spirit is simply gone. No acquisition. No reorganization. Just terminals going dark and yellow planes grounded permanently.

The internet celebrated. Spirit was the punchline, the worst-reviewed airline in America, the carrier you flew only when you were desperate or broke. Good riddance, right?

Here’s the problem: even if you never flew Spirit, you were paying less because Spirit existed. And now that it’s gone, your tickets are about to get a lot more expensive.

The airline nobody defended

Spirit’s reputation was earned. The reviews were genuinely terrible. Passengers complained about everything: seats that didn’t recline, carry-on fees higher than some airlines’ base fares, boarding passes that cost $10 to print at the airport, legroom measured in inches rather than comfort.

The airline pioneered “unbundling” in the United States — stripping the base fare down to almost nothing and charging separately for everything else. Want to choose your seat? Fee. Want to bring a bag? Fee. Want to check in at the airport instead of online? Fee. Want a cup of water that isn’t from the bathroom sink? Fee.

This wasn’t hidden. Spirit was shameless about it. The entire business model was: we’ll get you there alive and on time, and if you want anything beyond a seat and seatbelt, pay extra.

It worked, financially, for a long time. Spirit became the seventh-largest passenger carrier in North America. It expanded rapidly, offering flights to cities and routes that legacy carriers often ignored. Fort Lauderdale became a hub. Spirit held 29% of total airport capacity there.

But commercially, Spirit was a disaster for customer satisfaction. It routinely ranked dead last in customer service surveys. The complaints were constant. The jokes were relentless.

And yet: 34 years. Zero fatal accidents.

Think about that. Spirit flew millions of passengers over more than three decades using a business model everyone hated, and not one person died in a Spirit crash. The airline you wouldn’t shut up about on social media had a safety record better than carriers people praised.

What does that tell us about what passengers actually value versus what keeps them alive?

The disconnect is striking. People chose Spirit despite hating it. They complained about the experience while booking the next flight. Because at the end of the day, for a huge segment of travelers, price was the only thing that mattered.

Spirit understood this. They didn’t try to win on service or comfort or brand loyalty. They won on cost. And they were very, very good at it.

The effect you didn’t notice

Here’s the thing most people missed: you didn’t have to fly Spirit to benefit from Spirit.

When Spirit entered a market, fares dropped. Not just Spirit’s fares — everyone’s fares. Legacy carriers like American, Delta, and United would lower prices on routes where Spirit competed because they knew price-sensitive travelers would defect.

This is called the “Spirit Effect” in the industry. The presence of an ultra-low-cost carrier creates downward pressure on pricing across all competitors.

You could fly Delta from Fort Lauderdale to New York and pay less because Spirit was also flying that route. You never touched a yellow plane. But Spirit’s existence made your ticket cheaper.

Now Spirit is gone. And early data shows what’s happening to prices.

Routes that Spirit served are seeing fare increases of 14% on average in the first few days after the shutdown. Some markets are worse. Analysis of Fort Lauderdale routes — where Spirit was dominant — shows increases of up to 23%, or about $60 per round trip.

Historical data from previous ultra-low-cost carrier exits suggests this could get much worse. When ULCCs (ultra-low-cost carriers) have completely exited a market in the past, fares on those specific routes have jumped by over 70%.

You can expect the highest increases on leisure routes Spirit dominated: Florida to the Northeast, Southwest to the Midwest, point-to-point connections between secondary cities. The exact routes where budget-conscious travelers had the most options.

Consumer advocates saw this coming. William McGee, senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project, put it bluntly before the shutdown: “You do not have to fly a small carrier in order to benefit from its presence, because they will bring down the big guys’ fares. Without Spirit flying those routes, everyone will be paying more. He is right.

The airline you mocked on Twitter was subsidizing your travel. And now it’s gone, the subsidy is gone too.

How the model broke

Spirit’s business model — the ULCC approach — worked for nearly two decades. Then it stopped working.

The ULCC model is simple: offer the absolute lowest base fare in the market by stripping out everything that isn’t legally required. Charge fees for everything else. Keep costs insanely low through high aircraft utilization, dense seating configurations, point-to-point routing, and a single aircraft type to minimize maintenance complexity.

Ryanair pioneered this model in Europe in the 1990s and proved it could work at scale. Whether Europe’s ULCCs face the same pressures that killed Spirit is worth examining separately — a topic for another article maybe.

Spirit took this further than anyone in the U.S. market. A Spirit ticket was often half the price of a legacy carrier on the same route. Even after fees, if you traveled light and didn’t need extras, Spirit was dramatically cheaper.

This created a virtuous cycle. Low fares attracted price-sensitive leisure travelers. High load factors (planes flying full) generated revenue despite tiny margins. Rapid expansion into underserved markets created growth.

What killed it was a combination of factors that hit simultaneously.

First, fuel costs spiked. The Iran conflict that escalated in early 2026 sent jet fuel prices soaring. Airlines with fuel hedging strategies and diversified revenue streams could absorb this. Spirit, operating on razor-thin margins, could not. When your entire value proposition is “cheapest fare,” you can’t pass significant cost increases to customers without losing your competitive advantage.

Second, legacy carriers copied the unbundling model without the stigma. Delta introduced Basic Economy in 2012. American and United followed. Suddenly you could fly a legacy carrier for roughly the same price as Spirit, but with better connections, more reliable service, and without the social shame of admitting you flew Spirit.

Spirit lost its price advantage but couldn’t raise fares without destroying its brand identity. They were trapped.

Third, operational issues unique to Spirit compounded the problem. Engine defects grounded portions of the fleet. The airline had to cut capacity, which raised per-seat costs. They furloughed pilots, then reversed the decision because pilots were leaving faster than they could be replaced.

Spirit filed for bankruptcy in 2024. Emerged. Filed again in 2025. By early 2026, the airline was operating at 1.8% market share, down from 5.1% the year before.

The ultra-low-cost model that once seemed unstoppable turned out to be incredibly fragile. When external costs rose and competitors matched your pricing, there was no cushion. No premium product to subsidize the cheap seats. No loyalty program to retain customers. No operational flexibility.

Spirit’s entire business was predicated on being the cheapest option in a stable cost environment. When costs became unstable and competitors got cheap, Spirit had nothing left.

The merger that wasn’t

In April 2022, JetBlue offered to buy Spirit for $3.6 billion.

This wasn’t a rescue mission. JetBlue saw strategic value. Spirit’s fleet, routes, and slots at congested airports would have made JetBlue significantly larger overnight. The combined airline would have been the fifth-largest in the United States.

Spirit’s board initially rejected the offer. They had already agreed to merge with Frontier Airlines. But JetBlue persisted, eventually convincing Spirit shareholders that their offer was superior.

Then the Department of Justice stepped in.

The DOJ’s Antitrust Division argued that allowing JetBlue — a higher-fare airline — to acquire Spirit would reduce competition and increase fares for consumers. Their reasoning: Spirit was an ultra-low-cost carrier that put downward pressure on industry pricing. Eliminating Spirit would remove that pressure.

In January 2024, a federal judge blocked the merger.

The decision was framed as protecting consumers from higher fares. Senator Elizabeth Warren praised it. Consumer advocacy groups celebrated. The government had prevented a big airline from swallowing a small competitor and raising prices.

Two years later, Spirit Airlines ceased operations entirely.

And fares are going up anyway.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy addressed this directly on ABC’s “This Week” following the shutdown. When asked about the blocked merger, he was blunt: “The Joe Biden-Pete Buttigieg administration and DOJ tanked that deal. Immediately after that, they filed for bankruptcy.”

Whether the merger would have saved Spirit is unknowable. JetBlue was itself struggling financially by 2026 and might not have been able to sustain a combined operation. But the counterfactual is clear: the government intervention designed to protect consumers from higher fares resulted in Spirit disappearing and fares rising anyway.

This is the risk of antitrust intervention based on hypothetical consumer harm. The DOJ prevented a merger because they believed it would lead to higher prices. Instead, Spirit collapsed, capacity disappeared from the market, and prices are increasing regardless.

Consumers lost the low-cost option entirely. The thousands of people who relied on Spirit for affordable travel now have fewer choices and higher fares. The 17,000 Spirit employees are unemployed.

I argue that it’s hard to see who the US government protected.

The final hours

Few testimonials of individuals I caught while researching for this article:

Wes Egan had worked as a Spirit dispatcher for 23 years. He was in the operations center in Orlando late Friday night when senior managers made the announcement around 11:30 PM: operations would cease at 3:00 AM.

A Spirit pilot messaged asking for information about the fate of the airline. Egan responded through the cockpit communication system: “UNOFFICIALLY WE STOP FLYING AT 0300 EST ON 05/02.”

No Spirit flights were in the air when the shutdown took effect. The company grounded everything in advance. The last flights landed just before 3:00 AM Saturday.

By Saturday morning, Spirit’s check-in desks sat empty. Yellow kiosks displayed shutdown notices. Departure boards showed strings of canceled flights.

At LaGuardia, a sign in Terminal A read: “We regret to inform you that Spirit Airlines has ceased global operations. All Spirit flights have been cancelled, and customer service is no longer available.”

Angela Moreno was supposed to fly from Fort Lauderdale to Nashville Saturday morning for a wedding. She found out about the shutdown just before heading to the airport. No Spirit customer service to call. No rebooking options. Just a canceled flight and a scramble to find another carrier willing to sell a last-minute ticket.

Jeremiah Burton, a 45-year-old HVAC technician, was at Baltimore/Washington International Airport on Friday afternoon preparing for his first flight ever. He’d Googled “cheapest airline ticket” and paid about $500 to fly Spirit to New Orleans to visit his daughter and her newborn twins.

His flight never took off.

Lyndee Domka and her family were at Walt Disney World, scheduled to fly Spirit back to Ann Arbor, Michigan on Saturday. Instead, they rented a car from Enterprise and drove 17 hours home.

Thousands of similar stories played out across the country. People mid-trip with return flights on Spirit. People booked for weddings, funerals, family visits. All suddenly stranded with no airline to call and no clear path home.

Other carriers stepped in with “rescue fares” — capped prices around $200 to help stranded passengers rebook. Southwest said it carried more than 20,000 former Spirit passengers on Saturday alone. United reported about 14,000.

But rescue fares don’t help if you can’t afford an extra $200, or if the available flights don’t match your schedule, or if you were mid-trip and now need to extend hotel stays while figuring out how to get home.

The Association of Flight Attendants sent a message to Spirit crew members early Saturday: “We are delivering the hardest news of our lives that Spirit will cease operations at 3:00 AM Eastern Time on May 2, 2026.”

Flight attendants were sent home or back to their bases, with travel covered. Then they were unemployed.

Spirit pilots, through their union ALPA, released a statement: “The news that Spirit Airlines has ceased operations is a devastating blow to more than 2,000 ALPA pilots and thousands of other hardworking employees who dedicated their careers to this airline. Spirit’s highly trained and skilled pilots believed in the airline’s future enough to put their own livelihoods on the line, contributing tens of millions in annual concessions to help secure a path through restructuring.”

Jon Jackson never flew his retirement flight.

17,000 people woke up Saturday without jobs. Many more woke up without flights home.

What happens next

The immediate impact is chaos. Stranded passengers, canceled trips, scrambles to rebook.

The medium-term impact is higher fares and reduced service.

Spirit operated routes that legacy carriers often ignored: smaller cities, secondary airports, point-to-point connections that don’t fit hub-and-spoke networks. Some of those routes will disappear entirely. Others will see reduced frequency and higher prices.

Fort Lauderdale is the hardest hit. Spirit held 29% of capacity there. JetBlue has announced plans to expand service, adding routes to cities ranging from Cali, Colombia to Nashville, Tennessee. But JetBlue is not an ultra-low-cost carrier. Their fares are higher. The replacement capacity will not be at Spirit’s price points.

Other markets will see similar dynamics. Frontier Airlines, the other major U.S. ultra-low-cost carrier, is trying to absorb some of Spirit’s routes. But Frontier is smaller and can’t fill all the gaps. Allegiant Air, another ULCC, operates a different business model focused on leisure destinations and doesn’t compete on most Spirit routes.

The legacy carriers — American, Delta, United, Southwest — will pick up some traffic. They’re offering rescue fares now, but those are temporary. Once the immediate disruption passes, there’s no incentive to maintain artificially low fares. The competitive pressure from Spirit is gone.

Industry analysts are predicting fare increases of 14-23% on average for routes Spirit served. Some markets could see increases above 70% where Spirit was the dominant carrier.

The “Spirit Effect” — downward pressure on industry pricing — is over.

Consumers lose. Budget travelers lose most. The people who relied on Spirit for affordable travel to visit family, attend events, or take vacations they couldn’t otherwise afford now have fewer options.

Regional airports lose. Smaller cities that Spirit served will see reduced air service. Some routes may not be replaced at all.

The U.S. airline market consolidates further. The Big Four — American, Delta, United, Southwest — get stronger. The ultra-low-cost segment shrinks. Frontier and Allegiant remain, but they’re small players. The competitive landscape becomes more oligopolistic.

Nobody in the industry thinks this is good for consumers. Even Transportation Secretary Duffy acknowledged that fares will rise: “Let’s say in the short term there won’t be an immediate impact, but certainly if you look three to six months out, fares would go up.”

Three to six months. That’s the timeline before the market fully adjusts to Spirit’s absence. Before the rescue fares end and the legacy carriers optimize pricing without Spirit undercutting them.

Your next flight might not be more expensive. But the one after that probably will be.

The joke nobody’s laughing at

Spirit Airlines was the easiest punchline in travel. The memes wrote themselves. The horror stories were endless. Flying Spirit was social proof that you were either broke or masochistic.

And yet. 34 years of operations. Millions of passengers carried. Zero fatalities. A perfect safety record that would be remarkable for any airline and is extraordinary for one operating on the thinnest margins in the industry.

Spirit kept costs low by cutting everything that didn’t affect safety. Uncomfortable seats? Annoying. Not dangerous. No free snacks? Frustrating. Not deadly. Fees for everything? Infuriating. But the planes were maintained, the pilots were trained, and nobody died.

The things Spirit did badly were the things that made flying miserable. The things Spirit did well were the things that kept people alive.

We judged them for the former and took the latter for granted.

The irony is that Spirit’s safety record was a direct result of the cost discipline everyone hated. Simplified fleet (single aircraft type) meant fewer maintenance complications. High aircraft utilization meant pilots flew more frequently and stayed current. Point-to-point routing meant fewer complex approaches at unfamiliar airports. Obsessive cost control meant no corners cut on anything related to airworthiness.

Spirit was cheap everywhere except where it mattered. And where it mattered, they were flawless.

Now they’re gone. The yellow planes are grounded. The jokes continue. But the one thing Spirit actually did right — keeping people safe while charging $39 for a ticket — nobody will remember.

What they’ll remember is the legroom.

17,000 people lost their jobs. Thousands of travelers are paying more for flights. Entire markets are seeing reduced air service. The competitive pressure that kept legacy carriers honest is gone.

But at least we got to make fun of Spirit Airlines one last time before it disappeared.

The Instagram post was right about one thing: 34 years, every flight landing safely. That’s not nothing. It just wasn’t enough.

Have you noticed higher fares on routes Spirit used to fly? Or are you one of the people who never flew Spirit but benefited from them anyway?

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ICAO Secretary General Juan Carlos Salazar wasn’t being dramatic. He was acknowledging a reality the aviation industry has been reluctant to confront directly: civilian aircraft are increasingly vulnerable to military threats in ways that traditional risk management cannot address.

Modern surface-to-air missile systems can reach 50,000 feet. Long-range weapons can strike targets hundreds of miles away. GPS jamming is routine in conflict zones. Drones operate at commercial aircraft altitudes. And the distinction between “conflict zone” and “safe airspace” has become meaningless when a missile system can be deployed in hours and weapons can travel across multiple countries’ airspace.

The 2026 World Overflight Risk Conference in Malta—where Salazar delivered his warning—honored the victims of three flights: Malaysia Airlines MH17 (2014), Ukraine International Airlines PS752 (2020), and Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 (2024).

Three civilian aircraft. Three different conflicts. Same fundamental problem: military weapons targeting—intentionally or accidentally—planes full of passengers who thought they were flying in safe airspace.

The industry’s response to each incident has followed a predictable pattern: shock, investigation, route adjustments, promises of better coordination. Then everything returns to normal until the next shootdown.

What nobody wants to acknowledge is that “normal” no longer exists. The assumptions underlying civilian aviation safety—that conflicts are geographically contained, that combatants can reliably distinguish civilian from military aircraft, that risk can be managed through airspace closures and route planning—are no longer valid.

The threat has fundamentally changed

Cold War-era overflight risk was relatively straightforward. Major powers had sophisticated air defense networks with clear command structures. Shooting down a civilian aircraft was politically catastrophic and usually avoidable with proper identification procedures.

Korean Air Lines Flight 007, shot down by Soviet interceptors in 1983, killed 269 people and created an international crisis. It took the Soviet Union eight days to admit responsibility. Eight years to issue a full apology. The incident damaged Soviet relations with the West for years.

That political cost acted as a deterrent. Major powers had strong incentives to avoid targeting civilian aircraft. Systems were designed with identification protocols. Command structures had multiple layers of authorization. The risk was never zero, but it was manageable.

What’s changed is the proliferation of advanced weapons systems to non-state actors and the normalization of GPS jamming, electronic warfare, and air defense operations in areas where civilian flights operate.

Malaysia Airlines MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine by a Russian Buk missile system operated by separatist forces. The investigation revealed the crew believed they were targeting a Ukrainian military transport. The aircraft was at 33,000 feet—well above the altitude where anyone expected surface-to-air threats.

298 people died. Russia has never admitted responsibility. The political cost that deterred the Soviet Union in 1983 didn’t materialize in 2014.

Ukraine International Airlines PS752 was shot down by Iranian air defenses minutes after takeoff from Tehran in January 2020. Two missiles fired by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps struck the Boeing 737 at around 8,000 feet. All 176 people aboard died.

Iran initially denied responsibility, then admitted three days later that the aircraft was misidentified amid heightened tensions with the United States. GPS jamming and electronic warfare systems were active. The air defense crews believed they were targeting an incoming missile or military aircraft.

Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 was shot down by Russian air defenses near Grozny in December 2024. The Embraer 190 was struck by shrapnel from a Pantsir-S1 missile system. Both pilots died, along with 36 passengers. 29 survived with injuries.

The aircraft was hit during its approach, at roughly 8,000 feet, after GPS jamming forced the crew to fly manually. Russian air defenses were active due to Ukrainian drone threats. The crew reported losing GPS navigation, then “bird strike in the cabin”—the shrapnel from the missile that had just torn through the fuselage.

Three incidents. Ten years. 652 deaths.

The pattern is clear: in conflict zones where air defenses are active, electronic warfare is routine, and command structures are ambiguous, civilian aircraft become targets. Not because anyone wants to shoot them down, but because the systems designed to protect military airspace cannot reliably distinguish between threats and passenger flights.

Why the current approach doesn’t work

The aviation industry’s standard response to overflight risk is route planning based on published threat assessments. Airlines use services that monitor conflict zones and recommend routing. Regulators issue NOTAMs warning of hazards. Aircraft avoid areas designated as high-risk.

This worked reasonably well when conflicts were geographically contained and weapons systems had limited range.

It doesn’t work now.

MH17 was flying at 33,000 feet over eastern Ukraine. 37 airlines were overflying that same airspace in the days before the shootdown. About 900 flights crossed the Donetsk region in the week prior. The area was known to be dangerous—Ukrainian military aircraft had been shot down days earlier—but nobody believed surface-to-air systems could threaten commercial aircraft at cruising altitude.

They could. They did.

PS752 departed from Tehran International Airport—not a conflict zone by any reasonable definition. The threat came from Iran’s own air defenses, protecting the capital city, firing on a departing commercial flight because crews believed it was an incoming threat.

Flight 8243 was approaching Grozny, Russia—a scheduled destination with regular commercial service. The risk assessment would have shown Ukrainian military activity in the region but nothing suggesting civilian aircraft at approach altitude faced imminent danger.

Until a Pantsir-S1 crew, operating under a closed-skies protocol during Ukrainian drone activity, fired on what they thought was a hostile target.

The problem isn’t that airlines are ignoring risk. The problem is that risk assessment depends on assumptions that no longer hold:

Assumption 1: Conflict zones are geographically defined. Reality: A missile battery can be deployed anywhere in hours. GPS jamming extends hundreds of miles beyond conflict boundaries. Long-range weapons cross multiple countries’ airspace.

Assumption 2: Military forces can distinguish civilian from military aircraft. Reality: GPS jamming disables transponders. Electronic warfare disrupts identification systems. Combat stress and ambiguous command structures lead to tragic errors. When air defenses are expecting drone or missile threats, a civilian aircraft on approach looks suspicious.

Assumption 3: International law and political consequences deter attacks on civilian aircraft. Reality: MH17, PS752, and Flight 8243 all occurred despite clear international prohibitions. The political cost has proven insufficient to prevent recurrence.

Assumption 4: Airspace closures and NOTAMs provide adequate warning. Reality: PS752 departed from an airport that had not closed its airspace. Flight 8243 was approaching a destination with active commercial service. MH17 was flying in airspace that remained open to civilian traffic despite military activity below. The warnings came too late or not at all.

What ICAO is actually proposing

At the Malta conference, Salazar outlined three priority measures—and notably, none of them involve route planning or airspace closures:

1. Rapid intelligence sharing: Getting threat information to airlines in real-time, before something goes wrong.

2. Enhanced risk assessment: Better tools for deciding when airspace should close, based on actual weapons capabilities rather than geographic proximity to conflict.

3. Stronger civil-military coordination: Ensuring military forces can identify civilian aircraft even when GPS and transponders are jammed.

These are necessary but insufficient. Real-time intelligence doesn’t help if the threat emerges faster than information can be distributed. Risk assessment can’t predict where a mobile missile system will be deployed tomorrow. Civil-military coordination breaks down when the military units operating air defenses aren’t under centralized command or are actively jamming the systems designed to identify civilian aircraft.

The fundamental problem is that civilian aviation safety depends on assumptions of predictability, clear communication, and rational actor behavior. Modern conflict zones provide none of these.

The question nobody wants to ask

Here’s what the industry isn’t saying publicly: if we applied a truly rigorous risk assessment—accounting for mobile air defense systems, GPS jamming, electronic warfare, and the demonstrated inability of military forces to reliably identify civilian aircraft under combat conditions—how much airspace would have to be considered too dangerous for commercial operations?

The answer is uncomfortable. Large portions of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, parts of North Africa and Asia would fail any honest safety assessment. The economic and operational impact of closing that airspace would be enormous.

So the industry doesn’t close it. Airlines keep flying. Passengers keep boarding. And everyone hopes the next incident doesn’t happen.

This is not a sustainable approach to safety.

What’s actually changed

Aviation has always involved risk. Engines fail. Weather turns violent. Mechanical systems break. The industry has gotten remarkably good at managing these risks through engineering, training, regulation, and continuous improvement.

But those risks are within the aviation system. They’re things the industry can control through better design, better procedures, better oversight.

Overflight risk is different. The threat comes from outside the aviation system. It involves weapons designed to destroy aircraft. It operates in environments where the normal rules don’t apply. And crucially, it’s getting worse, not better.

The proliferation of advanced air defense systems means more countries and non-state actors have the capability to threaten aircraft at cruising altitude. The normalization of GPS jamming and electronic warfare means the systems designed to identify and track civilian aircraft are routinely disabled. The increasing frequency of conflicts near major air routes means more airspace falls into ambiguous risk categories.

And the industry’s response—rerouting, temporary closures, risk assessments based on yesterday’s threat environment—can’t keep pace.

The legal framework that doesn’t work

Article 3 bis of the Chicago Convention explicitly prohibits the use of weapons against civilian aircraft. Every ICAO member state has agreed to this. The legal framework is clear.

The problem is enforcement. When MH17 was shot down, Russia denied responsibility. When PS752 was shot down, Iran denied responsibility for three days, then claimed it was an accident. When Flight 8243 was shot down, Russia initially blamed bird strike, then acknowledged air defense activity but characterized it as an unavoidable incident during legitimate military operations.

International aviation law depends on states accepting responsibility and facing consequences. That mechanism has broken down. Russia faced sanctions after MH17—but not specifically for the shootdown, rather as part of broader responses to the Ukraine conflict. Iran faced no specific aviation-related consequences for PS752 beyond diplomatic pressure. Flight 8243 is still under investigation, but the pattern suggests limited accountability.

The legal deterrent that worked during the Cold War—when shooting down a civilian aircraft meant international isolation and severe diplomatic consequences—no longer functions in an environment where great powers deny responsibility and the geopolitical stakes of holding them accountable outweigh aviation safety concerns.

The insurance industry’s quiet alarm

While airlines and regulators speak carefully about overflight risk, insurers are more direct. War risk insurance premiums for routes transiting conflict-adjacent airspace have increased dramatically. Some routes have become uninsurable at any reasonable premium.

This is the market speaking. Insurers assess risk based on data, and the data shows increasing frequency of incidents, expanding geographic scope of threats, and inadequate mitigation measures.

When insurance becomes prohibitively expensive, airlines reroute. But this happens reactively—after premiums spike—rather than proactively based on threat assessment. The result is that economic pressure, not safety analysis, often drives which airspace gets avoided.

This isn’t how aviation safety is supposed to work. The industry prides itself on proactive risk management, on preventing accidents rather than reacting to them. But with overflight risk, the industry is structurally reactive because the threats are external, unpredictable, and driven by geopolitical forces beyond aviation’s control.

What passengers don’t know

When you book a flight from Europe to Asia, the route planning algorithms consider dozens of variables: fuel efficiency, winds, air traffic congestion, airport slot availability. Overflight risk is one factor among many.

Most passengers assume that if a route is being flown, it’s been deemed safe. That’s not quite accurate. It’s been deemed acceptably risky—meaning the probability of incident is low enough that the flight is justified, even if the consequence of an incident would be catastrophic.

This risk calculation is usually sound. Millions of flights operate safely in conflict-adjacent airspace every year. The statistics are on the industry’s side.

But statistics are cold comfort when you’re on the aircraft that becomes the next exception.

The uncomfortable reality

ICAO’s warning in Malta wasn’t new information. Everyone in aviation knows the threat is real and growing. What Salazar did was say publicly what the industry discusses privately: the current approach to overflight safety isn’t working, and we don’t have a good solution.

Better intelligence sharing helps. Enhanced civil-military coordination helps. Improved risk assessment helps. But none of these address the fundamental problem: you cannot make civilian aviation safe in an environment where advanced weapons systems operate without reliable identification protocols, where GPS jamming is routine, and where the political cost of shooting down a passenger flight has proven insufficient to prevent it from happening repeatedly.

The only genuinely safe approach would be to avoid these areas entirely. But that’s economically devastating and operationally impossible. So the industry keeps flying, keeps hoping, and keeps promising to do better after the next disaster.

Three shootdowns in ten years. 652 deaths. And counting.

Salazar is right: we need to “reach beyond the boundaries of aviation as we have known it.” The challenge is that nobody knows what that actually means, and the economic and political barriers to fundamental change are enormous.

So civilian aviation continues to operate in an environment where the threat is real, growing, and ultimately outside the industry’s ability to control. We call it “acceptable risk” and hope the statistics stay in our favor.

Until they don’t.

Do you check flight routes before booking, or do you assume airlines have this handled?

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But buried in the strike announcements was a detail that most passengers missed entirely: “Flights operated by Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, SWISS, Air Dolomiti, Discover Airlines, Edelweiss, and Lufthansa City Airlines will not be affected by the strike.”

Wait. Lufthansa pilots are striking, but most Lufthansa Group airlines keep flying normally?

Welcome to the subsidiary model—where “working for Lufthansa” has become meaningless without specifying which Lufthansa, and where the pilot flying your “Lufthansa” flight might be earning €80,000 less per year than the pilot on the identical aircraft parked next to them, doing the identical work, simply because of which subsidiary employs them.

The April strikes weren’t just about pensions or working conditions. They were about a fundamental restructuring of European aviation that airlines don’t particularly want passengers to understand.

The Lufthansa you think you’re flying

When you book a Lufthansa flight, you’re probably picturing the German flag carrier. Lufthansa mainline. The airline with the history, the reputation, the premium service. The one that operates the A380s and 747-8s on long-haul routes and connects Europe through Frankfurt and Munich hubs.

That airline still exists. Its pilots start at €89,000 annually as First Officers and can reach over €280,000 as senior Captains. Add in the 13th-month salary, allowances, pension contributions, and benefits package, and total compensation easily exceeds €300,000 for experienced long-haul Captains.

These are some of the highest pilot salaries in Europe. The benefits package—particularly the pension scheme and travel privileges—are worth an additional €30,000-€50,000 per year in equivalent value. It’s called the “golden cage” in the industry: once you’re in, you rarely leave.

But here’s what’s changed: Lufthansa mainline is increasingly not the Lufthansa you’re actually flying on.

The Lufthansa you’re actually on

The Lufthansa Group now operates multiple airlines under different brands with radically different cost structures:

Lufthansa Mainline: The premium brand. €89K-€280K+ pilot salaries.

Eurowings: Low-cost subsidiary. Pilots start at €70K (€19K less than mainline), max out at €202K as Captains (€78K less than mainline senior Captains). Same A320 family aircraft. Often the same routes.

Discover Airlines: Long-haul leisure subsidiary (formerly Eurowings Discover). Starting First Officer salary: €55K-€65K. Significantly lower than mainline, though the benefits package is stronger than Eurowings.

Lufthansa CityLine: Regional operations. Being phased out and replaced by...

Lufthansa City Airlines: The new regional subsidiary. Same hub feeder flights from Frankfurt and Munich as CityLine. Same A320 aircraft. But under a new, lower-cost labor agreement. Senior Captain salary caps at ~€192K—an €88,000 annual gap compared to mainline Captains flying the identical aircraft on the same routes.

Then there are the acquired carriers: Swiss, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines—each with their own pay structures and labor agreements, generally somewhere between mainline Lufthansa and the low-cost subsidiaries.

For passengers, the difference is often invisible. You book “Lufthansa” on the website. The aircraft might have Lufthansa colors. You check in at a Lufthansa counter. But you’re actually on Eurowings, operating under a completely different employment contract with crews earning 15-35% less for doing essentially the same work.

Why airlines do this

The logic is straightforward: labor costs are the largest controllable expense for airlines. If you can operate the same route with the same aircraft but pay crews 20-30% less, you dramatically improve your cost structure and competitiveness.

Creating subsidiaries allows airlines to negotiate separate labor agreements with different pay scales, work rules, and benefits. The aircraft, the route, the service—all nearly identical. The employment contract—completely different.

Lufthansa didn’t invent this model. British Airways did it with subsidiary carriers. Air France-KLM operates Transavia as a low-cost arm. IAG runs British Airways, Iberia, Vueling, and Level under one corporate umbrella with vastly different crew costs.

It’s now the standard structure for European legacy carriers. The “flag carrier” brand operates premium long-haul routes. The subsidiaries handle short-haul, leisure routes, and anything where passengers are price-sensitive.

Management calls it “optimizing the cost base.” Union representatives call it “Tarifflucht”—tariff evasion. Creating new legal entities to escape existing labor agreements.

Both descriptions are accurate.

The two-tier workforce

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable: a Lufthansa mainline Captain and a Lufthansa City Airlines Captain can be flying the identical A320 aircraft on the same hub feeder route—Frankfurt to Hamburg, for example—and one earns €280,000 while the other caps at €192,000.

Same aircraft type. Same route. Same passengers. Same operational complexity. €88,000 annual pay difference.

The only distinction: which subsidiary hired them.

For young pilots entering the industry, the pathway has fundamentally changed. A decade ago, graduating from Lufthansa’s European Flight Academy (EFA) meant a job with Lufthansa mainline. High starting salary, clear progression to Captain, excellent benefits, job security.

Now? EFA graduates are funneled almost exclusively into Eurowings, Discover, or City Airlines. Mainline hiring is reserved for top performers or specific fleet needs. The “Lufthansa dream” has become a second-step career destination, not the default entry point.

And the transfer between subsidiaries? Effectively impossible without resignation and rehiring, often with loss of seniority. It’s not a stepping stone anymore. It’s a separate career track.

Aviation expert Gerald Wissel calls this a “two-class society” within the Lufthansa Group. That’s not rhetoric. It’s an accurate description of the employment structure.

How this changes strike dynamics

This is why the April 2026 strikes were so revealing.

When Vereinigung Cockpit (VC)—the German pilots’ union—called strikes at “Lufthansa,” they meant Lufthansa mainline, Lufthansa Cargo, Lufthansa CityLine, and sometimes Eurowings. But not Austrian, not Swiss, not Brussels Airlines, not Discover, not the new City Airlines.

Each subsidiary operates under different labor agreements. Different unions or different branches of the same union. Different negotiations. Different leverage.

During the strikes, Lufthansa rerouted passengers to the non-striking subsidiaries. Austrian Airlines kept flying. Swiss kept flying. Brussels Airlines kept flying. The parent company absorbed much of the operational disruption by shifting capacity to airlines whose crews weren’t striking.

This is the strategic value of the subsidiary model from management’s perspective: union fragmentation. When pilots at one subsidiary strike, the others keep operating. The group maintains service. The leverage of any single labor action is reduced.

From the pilots’ perspective, it’s frustrating precisely because it works. You can ground Lufthansa mainline for days, and the group still operates 60-70% of its schedule through subsidiaries. Passengers get rerouted. Revenue loss is minimized. The strike’s impact is diluted.

What passengers don’t see

When you book a Lufthansa flight, the website doesn’t clearly distinguish which airline will actually operate it. You might see “operated by Eurowings” in small print. You might not.

The branding obscures the operational reality. Lufthansa Group wants you to think of all these airlines as “Lufthansa”—same quality, same service, same experience. That’s the brand value.

But behind the scenes, they’re structurally different companies with different cost bases, different crew contracts, and different economics. A Eurowings flight costs significantly less to operate than a Lufthansa mainline flight on the same route with the same aircraft, primarily because crew costs are 20-30% lower.

Passengers pay similar fares. They receive similar service. But the crews operating those flights exist in completely different compensation structures.

This isn’t unique to Lufthansa. It’s how the entire European legacy carrier sector now operates. But Lufthansa Group is the largest and most complex example, with more subsidiaries and wider pay differentials than most competitors.

The union response

The April 2026 strikes were partly about pension contributions and working conditions. But the underlying tension is the subsidiary model itself.

VC union president Andreas Pinheiro stated it directly: “The responsibility for this [disruption] lies with the employer.” The union isn’t just negotiating for higher pay. They’re contesting the entire structure that allows the same work to be performed under vastly different contracts.

The creation of Lufthansa City Airlines—explicitly designed to replace CityLine with lower labor costs for identical work—was a primary trigger for the February strike ballot. Pilots voted 88% in favor of strike action with over 90% turnout.

That’s not a marginal dispute about a few percentage points in salary increases. That’s pilots saying the fundamental employment structure is unacceptable.

But here’s the union’s problem: stopping the subsidiary model would require preventing Lufthansa from creating new legal entities and operating them under different labor agreements. That’s not something you can negotiate in a traditional collective bargaining process. It’s a structural question about corporate strategy and European labor law.

Airlines have the legal right to create subsidiaries. They have the right to negotiate separate labor agreements with those subsidiaries. As long as each agreement meets minimum legal standards, there’s no violation.

Unions can strike to improve terms within each subsidiary. They can resist the closure of one subsidiary and creation of another. But they can’t prevent the model itself.

The economics that won’t go away

From Lufthansa management’s perspective, this isn’t optional. It’s competitive necessity.

HR Board Member Michael Niggemann stated bluntly: “Given the low margin at Lufthansa Classic, which in itself would not allow for investment in new aircraft, there is no scope for further increases. Strikes will not change this.”

Translation: Lufthansa mainline’s cost structure is too high to be profitable on many routes. The only way to operate those routes sustainably is through lower-cost subsidiaries.

Whether you think that’s legitimate business strategy or a race to the bottom depends on your perspective. But the underlying economics are real: European short-haul flying is brutally competitive. Low-cost carriers like Ryanair and Wizz Air operate at significantly lower costs. Legacy carriers either match those costs through subsidiaries or cede the market entirely.

Lufthansa chose to match costs through Eurowings and City Airlines rather than surrender short-haul European routes to LCCs. That strategic decision creates the two-tier workforce.

What this means going forward

The subsidiary model is permanent. Lufthansa isn’t consolidating back into a single airline with unified pay scales. The trend is in the opposite direction: more subsidiaries, more segmentation, wider differentiation between premium and low-cost operations.

For pilots, this means “Lufthansa pilot” is no longer a coherent job description. It’s a category containing multiple distinct careers with vastly different compensation, progression, and working conditions.

For passengers, it means booking “Lufthansa” tells you very little about which airline will actually operate your flight or what cost structure lies behind it.

For the aviation industry, it means labor negotiations are increasingly fragmented and complex. Strikes at one subsidiary barely impact the group’s overall operations. Union leverage is diffused across multiple bargaining units.

The April 2026 strikes disrupted operations for several days. They got media attention. They cost Lufthansa tens of millions in revenue and compensation claims.

But they didn’t change the fundamental structure. Lufthansa City Airlines still exists. The pay gap between mainline and subsidiaries remains. The two-tier workforce persists.

Because the question isn’t whether pilots deserve better pay or working conditions. The question is whether European legacy carriers can operate profitably with 1990s labor cost structures in a market dominated by low-cost competitors.

Management’s answer is no. Hence subsidiaries.

Unions’ answer is that undercutting your own workforce through corporate restructuring shouldn’t be an acceptable competitive strategy. Hence strikes.

Both positions have merit. Neither side is budging.

The system that hides itself

The most remarkable aspect of this entire structure is how invisible it remains to passengers.

You book Lufthansa. You fly on something that looks like Lufthansa. You assume the pilots are “Lufthansa pilots” earning “Lufthansa salaries” with “Lufthansa benefits.”

The reality—that you might be on Eurowings operated by crews earning €70,000 as First Officers instead of €89,000, or Discover with starting salaries as low as €55,000, or the new City Airlines designed specifically to undercut existing labor agreements—is buried in fine print and corporate structures most passengers never think about.

The strikes make it visible briefly. Then normal operations resume, and the structure fades back into the background.

Until the next strike, when Lufthansa pilots walk out and half the Lufthansa Group keeps flying anyway.

Because they’re not really “Lufthansa pilots.” They’re Austrian Airlines pilots, or Swiss pilots, or Discover pilots, or any of the half-dozen other subsidiaries that operate under the Lufthansa brand while maintaining completely separate employment structures.

The question “what does a Lufthansa pilot earn?” no longer has a single answer. It depends entirely on which Lufthansa you mean.

Next time you see news about Lufthansa strikes, check which subsidiaries are actually affected—you might be surprised how much of “Lufthansa” keeps flying anyway.

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Teruel Airport sits in the dusty, depopulated plains of Aragon province—what Spaniards call “Empty Spain.” It has a 2,825-meter runway, a control tower, a modest terminal, and zero commercial flights. What it does have is 120 hectares of tarmac, capacity for 250 widebody aircraft, and a climate that’s perfect for keeping

airplanes from corroding while they sit idle for months or years.

Qatar Airways just sent twenty widebodies there. Emirates, British Airways, and Air France have each sent at least one aircraft. More are coming. The Middle East airspace closure turned Teruel—already one of Europe’s largest aircraft storage facilities—back into what it became famous for during COVID: a parking lot for planes with nowhere to go.

This isn’t just about where to put extra aircraft. It’s about why airlines spend money to fly perfectly good planes thousands of miles just to park them in the desert.

Why not just leave them at the hub

When Qatar Airways’ operations shut down on February 28, the airline had aircraft scattered around the world. Some were at Doha. Others were stranded at their destination airports—London, Los Angeles, Houston, São Paulo, Lagos, Miami.

The obvious question: why not just leave them there?

Several reasons, starting with cost. Parking a widebody at a major international airport like London Heathrow isn’t free. You’re paying for the gate or stand, airport fees, and tying up valuable real estate that the airport would rather use for revenue-generating flights. A single widebody parked at Heathrow for a month can cost tens of thousands of pounds in parking and handling fees.

Multiply that by dozens of aircraft over an indefinite period, and you’re looking at millions in costs for planes that aren’t earning anything.

Then there’s the operational problem. Major airports are designed for aircraft that arrive, turn around, and leave. They’re not designed for long-term storage. Every gate matters. Every parking stand is planned weeks in advance. When you leave a 777 or A380 sitting for weeks, you’re creating problems for airport operations and potentially blocking space that could be used by active aircraft.

Security is another factor. An aircraft parked at a commercial airport in an active conflict zone—or even near one—faces risks that don’t exist at a dedicated storage facility in rural Spain. Drone strikes, missile attacks, and general instability are bad for multimillion-dollar assets. Qatar’s decision to send aircraft 3,000 miles to Spain rather than parking them regionally signals they don’t expect a swift return to normal operations.

The climate matters more than you’d think

Aircraft are built to fly, not to sit idle. When a plane parks for extended periods, things start going wrong. Seals dry out. Fluids settle. Corrosion begins. Moisture gets into places it shouldn’t.

This is where Teruel’s geography becomes critical. The airport sits at over 1,000 meters elevation in a semi-desert climate with more than 250 days of sun per year. The air is dry. Humidity is low. There’s no salt exposure from ocean air.

That matters because corrosion—rust, basically—is one of the biggest threats to aircraft during storage. Salt air accelerates it. Moisture makes it worse. Teruel’s climate dramatically slows the process, which means aircraft can sit for months or years with minimal degradation.

This is the same reason aircraft boneyards in the United States are concentrated in places like Arizona and New Mexico. Dry, inland climates preserve aircraft. Teruel is Europe’s version of that.

When airlines send planes to Teruel, they’re not just parking them—they’re preserving them for eventual return to service with minimal additional maintenance.

What actually happens during storage

Aircraft don’t just land and sit. There’s a process.

First, the plane gets what’s called a “preservation” treatment. Engines are sealed to prevent moisture and debris from entering. Pitot tubes (the sensors that measure airspeed) get covered. Windows and doors are taped. In some cases, aircraft are partially disassembled—seats removed, components taken out for separate storage or maintenance.

Fluids get topped off or drained depending on the expected storage duration. Tires are overinflated to prevent flat spots. In longer-term storage, aircraft might be jacked up to take weight off the landing gear entirely.

For extended storage—what the industry calls “deep storage”—the aircraft gets completely sealed from outside elements. Teruel’s Tarmac Aerosave facility specializes in this. They’ve done it for 140 aircraft during COVID. They know how to put a plane to sleep and wake it back up months or years later.

Even in storage, aircraft need periodic maintenance. Engines get run occasionally to circulate fluids. Systems get checked. The goal is to keep the aircraft in a state where it can return to service relatively quickly when needed, rather than requiring months of work to make it airworthy again.

The financial calculation

Flying an empty widebody from Doha or Los Angeles to Spain costs money. Fuel, crew, landing fees, positioning costs. For twenty aircraft, that’s easily over a million dollars just in ferry flights.

So why spend it?

Because the alternative—leaving them parked at expensive commercial airports or in potentially dangerous locations—costs more over time. And because keeping the aircraft properly preserved means they’ll be ready to return to service when operations resume.

There’s also an insurance angle. Aircraft parked in or near conflict zones face higher premiums. Moving them to a secure facility in Europe reduces risk and potentially lowers insurance costs.

The bet Qatar Airways is making: the cost of repositioning aircraft to Teruel and storing them properly is less than the combined costs of parking them elsewhere, potential damage from the conflict, degradation from improper storage, and the maintenance required to return poorly-stored aircraft to service.

It’s disaster economics. You spend money now to avoid spending more money later.

This isn’t new for Teruel

During COVID-19, Teruel hosted around 140 aircraft over two years. Airlines worldwide were scrambling to find storage space for planes made suddenly redundant by collapsed demand. Teruel became one of the go-to facilities because it had the capacity, infrastructure, and climate to handle the surge.

Alejandro Ibrahim, the airport’s general manager, describes it as acting “as a refuge and supported global air transport” during that crisis. The current situation is different—it’s geopolitical rather than pandemic-driven—but the underlying logic is the same. When airlines suddenly have aircraft they can’t use, they need somewhere to put them that won’t destroy the planes’ value while they wait for conditions to improve.

Teruel is built for exactly this. It’s not trying to be a commercial airport. It’s a specialist facility designed around aircraft maintenance, storage, and when necessary, recycling. No passenger terminals to worry about. No slot constraints. Just space, infrastructure, and expertise in keeping aircraft viable during extended downtime.

The airport typically receives two aircraft per day for routine maintenance work—engine swaps, heavy checks, modifications. That’s the business they prefer. Quick turnaround maintenance contracts are more profitable than long-term storage.

But when crisis hits—pandemic, war, economic collapse—Teruel becomes something else: a waiting room for aircraft with no clear timeline for return.

What this means for everyone else

For Qatar Airways, the twenty aircraft sitting in Teruel represent about 10% of their fleet grounded indefinitely. That’s capacity they can’t sell, routes they can’t serve, revenue they’re not earning.

For passengers, it means fewer flight options, higher fares on remaining routes, and longer connections as airlines reroute around closed airspace.

For Teruel itself and the surrounding region, it’s an economic boost. The airport is projecting over 1,000 jobs could be created by the end of the year as activity ramps up. Housing is being expanded to accommodate the workers. “Empty Spain” is getting a bit less empty, at least temporarily.

For the aviation industry broadly, it’s a reminder of how fragile the entire system is. Gulf carriers built business models on connecting Europe and Asia through Middle Eastern hubs. When that airspace closes, the model breaks. Aircraft designed to fly 16 hours a day sit idle in Spanish deserts instead.

And for Teruel Airport, it’s a return to reluctant prominence. Ibrahim notes that their important business is aircraft maintenance, not storage. But when airlines need somewhere to park planes during a crisis, Teruel keeps showing up.

“We’re working week to week because there’s no clear horizon,” Ibrahim said. “It really depends on the companies and how this could all develop in the coming months.”

Translation: nobody knows when these aircraft are coming home. So they’ll sit in the Spanish sun, engines sealed, systems preserved, waiting for the day when Middle Eastern skies reopen and flying becomes possible again.

Until then, Teruel’s tarmac fills up with some of the world’s most advanced aircraft, parked in neat rows, going absolutely nowhere.

Have you ever seen aircraft in long-term storage, or does the idea of a “plane graveyard” seem as strange to you as it does to most people?

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One question came up during the discussion that felt important enough to deserve its own piece: what about your employer?

The employer conversation is different. Your parents worry about losing you. Your employer worries about losing your productivity. Your partner is navigating fear and trust. Your boss is navigating liability and optics.

The stakes are different too. Your family can’t fire you for skydiving. Your employer can—or at least they can make your professional life harder in ways that don’t show up in your personnel file.

So the question isn’t just “how do I explain that this is safe enough to be worth the risk?” It’s “should I tell them at all? And if I do, how do I frame it so it doesn’t hurt my career?”

Your boss doesn’t need to know you jump out of planes. Legally, in most places, you don’t have to tell them. It’s not on your employment contract. It’s not relevant to your job performance. What you do on weekends is your business.

But at some point, it usually comes up anyway.

Maybe you need to take Monday off because you’re instructing all weekend and need recovery time. Maybe someone from the office sees your Instagram. Maybe you get injured and need to explain why you’re showing up to work with a broken ankle. Maybe it just comes up in conversation and you’re tired of being vague about your hobbies.

The question isn’t really whether your boss will find out. The question is whether you tell them proactively, let them discover it naturally, or actively hide it—and what the professional consequences are either way.

As a skydiving instructor and a lawyer, I've had versions of this conversation myself and watched others navigate it in different professional settings. Just like previously: what follows is not psychological or legal advice—just patterns I've noticed about when disclosure helps, when it hurts, and how to think through the decision.

What Your Employer Actually Cares About

Your employer doesn’t care that you skydive the same way your parents care. Your parents worry about losing you. Your employer worries about losing your productivity.

That sounds cold, but understanding it helps you frame the conversation correctly.

Here’s what they’re actually thinking about:

Reliability. Will this hobby make you unavailable when they need you? If you’re jumping every weekend between April and October and showing up Monday exhausted, that’s a problem. If you’re taking frequent trips for skydiving events, that’s leave they have to approve. If you’re injured and out for weeks, that’s coverage they have to arrange.

Insurance and liability. Some employers have group life insurance or disability policies that cover employees. High-risk activities can affect premiums or coverage terms. If you get hurt skydiving and file a disability claim, the insurer might push back. If you get hurt during a work trip that happened to include skydiving, the company could face liability questions.

Professional image. If you’re client-facing, what you do outside work can reflect on the company. Some industries see extreme sports as a positive—shows you’re bold, adventurous, capable of managing risk. Other industries see it as reckless judgment that makes clients nervous about trusting you with their money or legal matters.

Distraction. Are you mentally present at work or are you spending meetings planning your next jump? This one is usually subconscious bias rather than explicit concern, but it’s real.

Your boss is not thinking “what if they die?” the way your family is. They’re thinking “what if this affects their work?”

Understanding that distinction changes how you approach the conversation.

When You Don’t Need to Tell Them

You don’t owe your employer disclosure about hobbies unless:

Your employment contract explicitly requires it (rare, but some industries have clauses about high-risk activities).

You need accommodations—time off, schedule flexibility, recovery from injury—that require explanation.

It affects your ability to do your job—you’re traveling frequently for competitions, you’re too tired from weekend instructing to focus, you’re injured and can’t perform essential functions.

Your professional insurance or licensing has disclosure requirements (some lawyers, doctors, pilots have to report certain activities to their professional liability carriers).

You’re applying for a role where it’s directly relevant (safety officer, risk management, anything involving liability assessment).

If none of those apply, you can keep it private. Office small talk about weekend plans? “I was at the dropzone” is enough. You don’t need to elaborate. LinkedIn profile? You don’t have to list every hobby. Company social events? You’re allowed to be boring.

Some skydivers keep it completely separate from work for years. They don’t post on social media connected to their professional identity. They don’t mention it unless directly asked. They maintain clear boundaries between their work life and their skydiving life.

This works fine if you’re comfortable with it and if your job doesn’t require you to be publicly transparent about everything you do.

It stops working when you need something from your employer—time off, injury accommodation, schedule flexibility—and you haven’t laid any groundwork for why.

When Disclosure Helps Your Career

Some industries reward high-risk hobbies. Startups love it. Consulting firms love it. Sales organizations love it. Anything that values calculated risk-taking, stress management, and unconventional thinking sees skydiving as a credential.

I’ve seen skydivers get job offers partly because they mentioned it in interviews. The hiring manager wanted someone who could make decisions under pressure. Someone who could assess risk without freezing. Someone who wouldn’t panic when things went wrong.

I’ve seen promotions happen partly because leadership saw someone’s skydiving background as evidence of qualities they wanted—confidence, discipline, ability to train others, comfort with responsibility.

In these environments, skydiving is social capital. It’s a conversation starter. It signals things about your personality that are hard to demonstrate in a normal office setting.

Industries where this tends to work in your favor: tech, especially startups; finance, especially trading or investment banking; consulting; sales; anything entrepreneurial; any role where “bold decision-maker” is part of the job description.

But even in these environments, there’s a right way and a wrong way to mention it.

Right way: it comes up naturally, you’re matter-of-fact about it, you connect it to relevant professional skills if appropriate, you don’t make it your entire personality.

Wrong way: you bring it up constantly, you frame yourself as an adrenaline junkie, you make it sound reckless rather than calculated, you use it to show off rather than to illustrate a point about decision-making or risk management.

When Disclosure Hurts Your Career

Other industries see high-risk hobbies as a red flag. Conservative corporate environments. Government. Healthcare. Education. Law, depending on the practice area. Anywhere that values stability, predictability, and risk avoidance over boldness.

In these environments, mentioning that you jump out of planes can get you quietly categorized as “not serious” or “poor judgment” or “too much risk in their personal life.”

You won’t usually get explicit pushback. Nobody’s going to say “we’re not promoting you because you skydive.” But you might notice you’re not getting assigned the high-stakes clients. You’re not being considered for leadership roles. You’re being passed over for opportunities that go to people who seem more... stable.

This is especially true if you’re in a client-facing role where trust and conservatism matter. If you’re managing pension funds for retirees, they don’t want to hear that you spend weekends doing something they perceive as reckless. If you’re a family law attorney, clients who are going through custody battles might wonder about your judgment.

Some of this is generational. Older managers and clients are more likely to see skydiving as irresponsible. Younger ones are more likely to see it as cool. But not always—I’ve met 60-year-old executives who love that their employees do extreme sports and 30-year-old managers who think it’s idiotic.

You can’t always predict which environment you’re in until you’re already in it. Which is why some people default to keeping it private unless they have a compelling reason to disclose.

The Injury Problem

The biggest professional risk of skydiving isn’t reputational. It’s getting injured and needing to explain why.

If you break your leg skiing, nobody questions it. Skiing is mainstream. Skiing injuries are normal. Your employer processes your sick leave, you recover, you come back.

If you break your leg skydiving, the reaction is different. Some of it is conscious—”you chose to do something dangerous and now we have to cover for you.” Some of it is subconscious bias—”this person makes risky decisions.”

Legally, in most places, your employer can’t fire you for getting injured doing a legal activity on your own time. But they also don’t have to be happy about it. And if you’re in a probationary period, or an at-will employment situation, or up for review soon, an extended absence due to a skydiving injury can absolutely affect your standing.

This gets more complicated if you’re injured badly enough to need long-term disability. Group disability policies sometimes have exclusions or limitations for high-risk activities. You might find out after the fact that your coverage doesn’t apply the same way it would for a car accident or a slip on ice.

Some employers have policies that explicitly exclude coverage for injuries sustained during certain activities—skydiving, BASE jumping, motor racing, mountaineering. These policies are usually disclosed somewhere in your benefits documentation, but most people don’t read them until they need them.

If you’re planning to continue skydiving long-term, it’s worth checking:

Does your employer’s group life insurance have exclusions for high-risk activities?

Does your disability coverage apply equally to all injuries or are there activity-based limitations?

If you’re injured and unable to work, what’s the process for sick leave and what documentation do they require?

You don’t need to announce that you’re checking because you skydive. Just read the policy documents. Know what you’re covered for before you need it.

The Interview Question

Should you mention skydiving in job interviews?

Depends entirely on the role and the industry.

If you’re interviewing for a position where risk management, decision-making under pressure, or teaching skills are relevant, mentioning that you’re a skydiving instructor can be a strength. It’s evidence of competencies that are hard to demonstrate otherwise.

If you’re interviewing for a conservative role in a risk-averse industry, mentioning it is probably neutral at best and negative at worst. It’s not helping you get hired and it might make someone uncomfortable.

The safest approach: don’t volunteer it unless it’s directly relevant, but don’t hide it if asked. If the interviewer asks about hobbies or what you do outside work, you can mention it briefly and matter-of-factly. “I’m a skydiving instructor on weekends” is fine. “I’m an adrenaline junkie who lives for extreme sports” is not.

If they react positively, you can elaborate. If they react neutrally or seem uncomfortable, move on to other topics.

Some people list skydiving on their CV or LinkedIn under hobbies or certifications. This works if you’re in an industry where it’s seen as a positive. It backfires if you’re in an industry where it reads as poor judgment or distraction.

One test: look at the LinkedIn profiles of senior people in your industry. Do any of them list extreme sports or high-risk hobbies? If yes, it’s probably safe. If no, consider whether you want to be the first.

How to Have the Conversation If You Choose To

If you decide to tell your employer—either because you need to or because you think it’ll help—here’s how to frame it.

Be matter-of-fact. Don’t apologize. Don’t oversell. Don’t make it dramatic. “I instruct skydiving on weekends” or “I compete in skydiving” is enough. You’re stating a fact, not asking for approval.

Connect it to professional skills if relevant. If you’re in a role where decision-making, teaching, or risk assessment matters, you can mention those connections briefly. “It’s taught me a lot about managing risk and making decisions under pressure” is fine. Don’t overdo it.

Anticipate their concerns and address them proactively. If you’re asking for time off, explain how you’ll manage coverage. If you’re worried about injury perception, mention that you follow strict safety protocols. If you think they’re worried about distraction, make it clear that skydiving is weekends only and doesn’t affect your work focus.

Don’t make it your entire identity at work. The people who struggle most are the ones who can’t stop talking about skydiving. Every meeting, every conversation, every social event—it’s all skydiving. This makes you seem one-dimensional and makes your employer wonder if you’re actually focused on work.

Be prepared for them to be uncomfortable and not show it. Some managers will smile and nod and seem supportive while privately thinking you’re reckless. You can’t control their internal reaction. You can only control how you present it.

Know when to stop explaining. If your boss seems uncomfortable or uninterested, don’t keep pushing. State it once, answer questions if asked, and move on.

The Social Media Question

Do you post about skydiving on LinkedIn where colleagues and clients can see?

This one is personal preference, but here’s the calculus:

Posting publicly signals that you’re comfortable with professional contacts knowing. It can be good branding if you’re in an industry that values it. It can be a conversation starter. It can help you connect with other skydivers in your professional network.

It can also box you in. Once you’re “the skydiving lawyer” or “the skydiving consultant,” that’s part of your professional identity whether you want it to be or not. Some clients will love it. Some will find it off-putting. You don’t get to control which.

If you’re senior enough or established enough that your professional reputation is secure, posting about skydiving is lower risk. If you’re early career or in a conservative field, it’s higher risk.

Middle ground: keep your skydiving content on Instagram or Facebook where you control who sees it. Keep LinkedIn professional and skydiving-free unless it’s directly relevant to your work.

Some skydivers maintain completely separate online identities—professional accounts with no mention of skydiving, personal accounts with no mention of work. This works but requires discipline.

When Your Employer Finds Out Accidentally

Sometimes the decision gets made for you. Someone from the office sees you at the dropzone. A client Googles you and finds a picture of your happy face in a skydiving helmet. A colleague follows you on Instagram and sees a reel from last weekend at the dropzone.

If this happens, the best approach is usually to acknowledge it briefly and move on. “Yeah, I’ve been skydiving for years. It’s a great hobby.” Don’t overexplain. Don’t get defensive. Don’t make it a bigger deal than it needs to be.

If your employer seems concerned, you can address their concerns directly. “I understand it might seem risky, but it’s very structured and safety-focused. It doesn’t affect my work schedule or availability.”

Most of the time, people are just curious. They’ll ask a few questions, maybe tell you you’re crazy, and then forget about it. It becomes a known thing about you but not a defining thing.

The exceptions are environments where it genuinely does affect how you’re perceived professionally. In those cases, you can’t un-ring the bell. You just have to demonstrate through your work that you’re reliable, focused, and competent despite the hobby they think is reckless.

The Cost-Benefit Calculation

Whether to tell your employer comes down to:

What’s the upside? Does it help you professionally, build relationships, or make your life easier in terms of scheduling and accommodations?

What’s the downside? Does it risk your reputation, limit your opportunities, or create awkward dynamics?

What’s the cost of hiding it? Are you constantly managing what you say, who you connect with online, and how you explain your weekends?

For some people in some industries, being open about skydiving is net positive. It’s part of their professional brand. It signals things they want to signal. It doesn’t hurt and might help.

For others, it’s net negative. It boxes them in, limits opportunities, or creates bias they’d rather avoid.

For most people, it’s probably neutral. Your employer doesn’t care much either way. It’s fine to mention if it comes up. It’s fine to keep private if you prefer.

The mistake is assuming there’s one right answer. There isn’t. It depends on your industry, your role, your seniority, your employer’s culture, and what you’re trying to achieve professionally.

Think through what you’re optimizing for. If you want to climb the corporate ladder in a conservative industry, maybe keeping skydiving private is strategic. If you want to build a personal brand around risk-taking and unconventional thinking, being public about it might help.

Just don’t stumble into the decision accidentally. Make it deliberately.

What Success Looks Like

A successful approach to skydiving and professional life doesn’t mean everyone at work knows and loves that you skydive. It means you’ve thought through the tradeoffs and made a choice that works for you.

Maybe that’s being completely open about it and using it as part of your professional identity.

Maybe that’s mentioning it when directly asked but not broadcasting it.

Maybe that’s keeping it entirely private except for the few people who need to know.

All of those can work. What doesn’t work is being surprised by the professional consequences—positive or negative—because you didn’t think through how disclosure would play in your specific environment.

Your employer doesn’t need to know you jump out of planes. But if they’re going to find out anyway, you’re better off controlling the narrative.

Have you told your employer you skydive? Did it help your career, hurt it, or not matter at all? How did you decide whether to disclose?

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