18 August 2026 · by Jorg
Someone on Reddit asked me where home is. I said the Netherlands, and then added something I have repeated for years without ever once checking it: that my flights to Asia went from about eleven hours to thirteen or fourteen, once airlines stopped flying over Russia.
I have logged every flight I have taken since 2014. So I checked.
I was wrong twice.
One dot is one flight I took. Blue is the flight out, orange is the flight home. The bars are the mean before and after February 2022. Top panel: the routes that used Russian airspace. Bottom panel: the ones that never went near it.
The flights out were never eleven hours, and they have barely moved. 12h03 before February 2022, 12h50 after. Forty-seven minutes.
The flights home are a different story. 12h00 before, 14h25 after. And the two sets do not overlap at all. My slowest scheduled flight home before the closure was 13h30. My fastest one since is 13h55. Every flight home is longer than every flight home used to be.
Over twelve years I switched carriers and flew several types, so those means are not a like-for-like. Here is one flight number on one aircraft type, three before and three after.
| February 2018 | 12h55 |
| November 2018 | 12h55 |
| December 2019 | 12h20 |
| July 2022 | 14h15 |
| April 2023 | 15h20 |
| July 2023 | 14h10 |
My Singapore and Bangkok flights never went near Russian airspace. Same person, same twelve years, same habit of writing everything down.
Homebound mean before: 12h22. After: 12h23. One minute.
That is the part I did not expect, and it is the reason I believe the top panel. The effect sits only on the routes that lost the airspace.
These are scheduled times, which is the right measure for this question. A schedule is the airline's own statement of how long the route takes, and it only moves when the airline decides the route has changed for good. An actual arrival moves with the wind on the day.
Two limits. I have flown home from Northeast Asia only four times since 2022, which is a small number to hang a mean on. And my log shows the effect, not the cause: I do not know any particular airline's routing policy. I know what my own arrival times say.
For what it is worth, the shape is not mine alone. Flightradar24 reported the same asymmetry across the industry: roughly an hour added eastbound, against westbound returns running up to three hours longer.
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