NEW DELHI: Travel time between east – including India — and the west could reduce in coming weeks with key aviation regulators allowing their country/region’s commercial aircraft to resume overflying Afghanistan, which had stopped in August 2021 after Taliban took over the country. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) this week allowed American airliners to overfly Kabul flight information region (FIR, that covers all of Afghanistan) over 32,000 feet “due to diminished risks to US civil aviation operations at those altitudes.”
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has a similar directive for its member state airlines that they should not fly below 32,000 feet as “there is a continued possible threat to civil aviation resulting in a high risk to operations at (lower) altitudes.”
