Conflict Zone Drones, Civil Aviation And Airspace Safety

0:09Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Window Seat, our Aviation Week Air Transport podcast. I'm ATW and Aviation Week Air Transport Editor-in-Chief Karen Walker. Welcome on board. So I'm delighted to be joined once again by Matt Borey, who is a co-founder and chief intelligence officer at Osprey Flight Solutions. Matt, welcome and thank you for your time. Matt is a risk management expert with 15 years experience in aviation safety and security, specializing in conflict zone overflights. Before becoming a consultant at Osprey, Matt was an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He joined his own window seat in March, shortly after the war between the US and Iran broke out.

0:55That war continues, of course, but this week we're focusing on the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, and in particular on a statement made on September 1st by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying that Russian airspace had become completely unsafe and would be closing. Specifically he said, and I quote,

1:45Russian airspace will effectively be closing. The safe days in Russia's skies are over, close quotes. So he was referencing there the increased use of drones in Russian airspace and essentially issuing a dire warning. So Matt, can I start first of all with you? What are your thoughts on the timing of that statement? Why Zelensky made that statement when he did? And what do you think were his main objectives?

2:16Matt Borie: Well, thank you for having me, Karen. And this situation is one that Osprey has been monitoring very closely, not just for the last few days or months, but the last several years. Since 2023 in particular, Ukraine has started to conduct drone attacks deeper and deeper into Russian territory. And during these drone attacks, Russia closes airports and portions of its airspace for periods of time as it's conducting civil military deconfliction to deal with the drones with air and air defense activity. Now, this activity has gotten more increased in frequency over the years to the point where in August alone, we had over 900 airport periods of disruption inside of Russian airspace, including airports in Moscow, St.

3:10Matt Borie: Petersburg, and Sochi, three of the largest urban centers in the country. Now, Zelensky making the statement now is effectively telling the rest of the world what they've been doing for the last couple months in particular, which is systematically disrupting Russian airspace. Now, saying Russian airspace is unsafe or that civilian aircraft shouldn't fly in the airspace because of the drone activity and the air defense activity, Zelensky hasn't said anything different than what the European Union, for example, has said. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency, EASA, has a conflict zone information bulletin for Western Russian airspace.

3:47Matt Borie: It says it's high risk at all altitudes. It recommends operators, obviously EU-registered operators, but in general, it recommends not flying in that portion of the airspace due to safety issues. So Zelensky hasn't necessarily said anything differently than what other governments, for example, have said. But the timing is meant to apply pressure to Russia publicly. it puts economic focus on the conflict, not just the actual kinetic fighting. But now you have airlines registered in countries throughout the Asia Pacific region, countries in the Middle East and North Africa that still have diplomatic ties with Russia.

4:26Matt Borie: And now their air carriers are being put in the spotlight as still having flights to Moscow. And so pressure is being applied to these countries to now have to look at what their airlines are doing and then potentially make statements on the topic. The airlines are having to make statements on the topic. And so it's bringing the war in its conflict state to the forefront of the interconnection of air travel between different parts of the world. And that intersection between civil aviation and where conflict zone activity is occurring is one that typically gets plenty of attention, especially in a country like Russia, where on Christmas Day of 2024, they accidentally shot down an airliner during a Ukrainian drone attack in an incident of misidentification.

5:15Matt Borie: So Zelensky is essentially just highlighting the potential risk that airlines could face if they fly in Russian airspace. Not really a different warning than what, again, European authorities have already said, But it brings the focus back on how is Russia trying to conduct a war while at the same time have economic activity and tourism and trade that is facilitated by air travel? And essentially calling out the airlines, calling out the insurers brings this to the public attention again. It doesn't necessarily highlight activity that's new or different. It's just bringing it back to the forefront.

5:49Yeah, that is interesting because essentially what he's saying, it's not like he made the statement sort of saying, it's about to become very dangerous. I'm giving you advance warning. This has been happening and building for some time. So he's not warning of something to come. He's basically warning of something that's already there and getting to be more of an issue. You've got some numbers, I think, in terms of sort of how the number of drones and drone activity has been increasing there. Yes.

6:23Matt Borie: So when this started to happen, where outside of border provinces, as in how Osprey tracks the data, essentially over 300 kilometers inside of Russian airspace, we consider a deep strike in the conflict. And so we were seeing, you know, 20 to 50 attacks in 2023 per month, right? So maybe one or two a day. In 2024, it went from like 50 to 100. So, you know, two or three a day. In 2025, we started getting into the hundreds per month and even the thousands per month, so dozens per day. In 2026, we reached over 10 ,000 in the April timeframe, which we thought at Osprey was kind of an inflection point.

7:17Matt Borie: That means 10 ,000 is 300 plus drones per day launched towards areas deep inside Russia. Well, in August, it reached almost 17 ,000, so over 500 drones per day. And since the statement, we did see a small drop because there was a visit to Moscow and Kiev by Trump's negotiators. And so both sides for a three-day period decreased the amount of activity in attacks, not completely halted, but a decrease, especially in attacks on each other's capitals. But now that that's over, that has shot right back up. Moscow had drone shoot downs overnight. So we're basically back into the same pattern. The bottom line is, if you look at the data on a graph, I know this is a podcast, just think about a hockey stick, right?

8:09Matt Borie: And it's basically a hockey stick. So it started out with a gradual increase. And then in 2026, while it had increased substantially from where it started, it has now gone up into the curb of a hockey stick. And we're at over 500 drones a day being launched into various parts of Russia, stretching from, for those that are geography experts, St. Petersburg in the west, Murmansk in the northwest on the Arctic Circle, all the way to areas like Yekaterinburg in Siberia, right? 2 ,500 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, and then down to the Caucasus regions, Sochi, and the Black Sea enclaves that Russia has oil, gas, and other maritime and Navy assets.

8:57Matt Borie: So this is a wide swath of territory where these drones are being launched. They're doing this to spread out Russian air defense capacity, so it can't be masked in any one spot. They're continuing to target Moscow heavily, though, to also force Russia to try to protect the capital. And so it's essentially turning into a situation where Ukraine's best defense is a good offense. They face interceptor capacity shortages at home to defend Kiev from Russian drone and missile attacks. Well, if you're launching drones into Russian airspace every night, 500 plus across 2000 kilometers of territory, and Russia has to deconflict from civil aviation, it also needs to deconflict its aircraft and its own drones.

9:41Matt Borie: that it's trying to launch at Ukraine from the Ukrainian activity and its own air defense activity. So this isn't just designed to disrupt Russian airspace or to target locations on the ground in Russia. It is. Those are two of the goals. The other goal is to try to stop Russia from conducting as many attacks in the Ukraine. And to be honest, Ukraine is launching twice the number of drones into Russia in long range strikes than Russia is launching into Ukraine. And I don't think very many people would have thought four years into this conflict, right, that the situation would be Ukraine is launching more drones over 300 kilometers in distance than Russia is, and not even more, but by 100 % increase compared to the others.

10:24Matt Borie: So it is a very interesting development in how Ukraine has been able to develop these types of capabilities and the reasons why they've done so have been out of necessity, right? They haven't been able to master the ability to produce air defense capabilities necessary to shoot down ballistic missiles. But they've adapted and said, well, we can overcome some of these limitations by developing our own offensive strike weapons that will inhibit the Russian military's ability to conduct its strike operations in the way that it would want to. Yeah, really through the use of drones, Ukraine has switched things around and taken the war to Russia, as opposed to defending itself from the Russian attacks.

11:12These things must be very disruptive to airport operations, yes?

11:17Matt Borie: So the airports in Moscow, I mean, again, we were seeing in the 23, 24 timeframe, maybe a disruption a month, right? And it would be a big deal because a Moscow airport was disrupted. In the 25 timeframe, it became, you know, multiple times a month. Now it's nearly every day. and not just one of the four or two of the four airports in Moscow. We're talking all four airports in Moscow, some of them multiple times a day, typically at night, but now the activity is expanded to really cover a large portion of the 24-hour time clock. And so the disruption in Moscow is being felt by the population in Moscow, right?

12:01Matt Borie: The people flying in out of Moscow are not Western tourists. They're not, you know, Americans, right, going on vacation. It's Russian elite flying in and out of the country. The average Russian citizen isn't taking a flight to southern Turkey or to the Gulf states for a vacation. These are people in Russia with means that are flying in and out of the country. and they're probably doing it for leisure or business, and that's being disrupted by this activity. And so it's one of the things that Ukraine has done to try to bring the war home, so to speak, to the local population. The other is striking targets like Wildberries and Ozone, which are basically the Russian version of Amazon and Walmart.

12:52Matt Borie: So they're attacking the warehouses, which means Russians aren't getting their toilet paper. They aren't getting their toothpaste. They aren't getting their socks and their T-shirts the same way that Americans would feel if your Amazon or your other direct deliveries to your house were being disrupted. It brings the wars home. They're not just striking those because they have some logistics capacity to support the military. They're also doing it to disrupt the everyday life of Russian citizens. And then also the attacks on Russian oil refineries where they've lost about 40 percent of their capacity.

13:27Matt Borie: They've had to start importing refined fuels into Russia. There are shortages of gasoline and other diesel products being reported in Moscow and other main urban centers. And what this means is the average Russian citizen actually has to think about the consequences of the war with Ukraine. I can't go on holiday. I can't go on my business trip the way that I want to. I can't get the deliveries to my house the way that I want. I can't feel my car up with fuel the way that I want. And so these are things that the Ukrainian population has been dealing with since day one of the war, right? Their airspace is completely closed by their own choice, but for the sake of aviation safety.

14:04Matt Borie: And there's been a systematic disruption to their way of life in Ukraine. Now, while border areas in Russia have probably felt this for the last several years, you're actually having St. Petersburg, Moscow, Sochi, other larger urban centers in Russia having disruptions that four years ago no one would have thought possible. And it's due to the development of drone capabilities, tactics and employment by Ukraine. And so the, as you say, what Ukraine is really doing is hurting Russia and Russian people economically. It's hurting them in their pocket. It's hurting in their everyday lives. And that's an interesting, again, another turn of events.

14:50Matt Borie: Exactly. And again, Ukraine is hitting military targets as well. Right. And, you know, disrupting airports has a military application to it. Disrupting the airspace does as well. Anything with logistics and supply chain. So the targeting of wild berries, which is likely supplying, you know, certain items to the Russian military has a military application. And obviously they're targeting, you know, oil capacity and, you know, military ammunition depots and rocket plants, a wide variety of targets that do have military applications, though some of these are also having the knock -on effect, which is the civilian populace.

15:30Matt Borie: And, you know, there's a term called psychological warfare, right? And this is a form of psychological warfare, right? So while there may not be killing civilians or killing military personnel with these attacks, when an airport has to close because of drones, there's air raid sirens going off in Moscow, right? Like the everyday Russian citizen has to deal with something that is difficult to deal with psychologically. There's a psychological impact from missing your holiday, from not getting your order delivered. And it's because of these Ukrainian military actions. And so while, you know, what is the impact on, you know, loss of lives or the total loss of goods and services?

16:12Matt Borie: Some of that we can quantify, not a lot of loss of life, impact on goods and services. Russia will say they're withstanding it. Other outside economic reviews will say it's hurting. But at the end of the day, it comes down to hearts and minds a lot of time when it comes to warfare, right? Is the local populace going to continue to support an operation one way or another? And while Ukraine may not win the war with this psychological operation, so to speak, it does have an influence on the trajectory of the conflict. It makes things a lot more uncomfortable for everybody in Russia. With the Russian airspace issue, ever since this war started, a lot of airlines, some voluntarily, some because of the regulatory authorities or governments, have been avoiding Russian airspace, as we know, and then others are not.

17:03Have you seen any response? Is it more likely that some of those that are still going through Russian airspace might reroute as a result of that statement?

17:16Matt Borie: There may be some decrease in the amount of overflights to Russia by Asian carriers that may still be using the polar routes. There may be some reroutes, though, where instead of flying from the Gulf states up through the Caucasus region and Kazakhstan, and then from east to west in Russia, that more airlines go through Eastern Europe and then up through the Baltic Sea and that corridor, though it's a longer route. I think what's more likely is you'll see airlines start to limit the number of flights that they have, potentially, rather than a blanket cancellation. They would probably be reviewing their flights at night because, again, that still is where most of the activity is happening.

18:00Matt Borie: So reducing their risk profile and exposure by limiting flights to certain time periods during the day. I don't think this is going to lead to a blanket change. There are significant pressures on airlines from a routing perspective on what airspace is available to them for these types of international operations. A lot of the airlines that are flying to Russia now aren't, you know, bordering Russia, right, where it's, you know, an hour flight from from a Eastern European state to to a part of Russia. Well, those flights aren't happening. These are flights that are going thousands of kilometers.

18:37Matt Borie: And so for these types of long flights, there's only certain airspace that they probably can even use to conduct it, especially due to other conflict zone issues. And so the fact that these routes are also generating revenue, positive revenue for these airlines is another reason why I think they'll likely persist in some form or fashion. And there's no real indication that insurers are going to pull coverage because of a statement from Zelensky. They may pull coverage because of the activity that's happening, but that activity was happening prior to Zelensky's statement. It's going to persist after the statement.

19:15Matt Borie: Increased cost for insurance is probably going to be part of the equation. But if you can continue to increase ticket prices because the market demands there from the Russian population that has the means to travel, it will probably mean that you'll continue to see flight operations. Some of these airlines are taking off in the Middle East. And last night, there were ballistic missiles shot down over Jordan. I mean, there's aircraft taking off from Jordan and flying to Moscow, right? They were dealing with conflict zone issues the second they took off. They're dealing with conflict zone issues the second they land.

19:53Matt Borie: And that's been going on for months now. And in certain cases for extended periods of time, even beyond that, depending on where they've been operating to and from. And so I think the airlines understand that there is the risk to their operations. It's just not just it's not a decision based solely off safety and security. It's based off risk management and then risk acceptance as well as risk transference, right? So you make the flight as safe and secure as possible. It has a residual risk. How much are you going to accept financially of that risk and how much can you transfer to an insurer? And a lot of the decisions get made based off that, not solely based off does this risk assessment say go or no go.

20:38Matt Borie: Most risk assessments say go with X number of mitigations, and the more mitigations there are, the more it costs. And one of the biggest mitigations is, from a risk management perspective, insurance. So if you can transfer the risk to someone else, you have mitigated it. It's an uncomfortable topic. We don't want to think about someone flying a flight that's safe or not safe, but it's not as black and white as that, especially with where some of these flights are happening from in the first place. And I'm not saying airlines should cancel their flights. They would go out of business if they canceled all of their flights where there was a conflict zone.

21:15Matt Borie: There's conflict zones in significant parts of the Middle East right now, and the Russia-Ukraine conflict is not localized to the border. We're talking 2 ,000 kilometers plus from the Ukrainian border in all directions. If you said no flights in any of those places all the way down to the Middle East, how would there be connectivity in air traffic? So our advice to operators is have a thorough risk management process, input the right data into that, utilize your own internal expertise and external expertise to support your decision making, have an audible trail of decision making, engage with your governments, engage with your insurers to help transfer and mitigate as much risk as possible on top of the mitigations you're putting in place yourself.

22:02Matt Borie: and then have this be a continuous feedback loop because you can't just do a risk assessment in August and then say it's fine in September. The situation is going to change. We've seen that in this conflict. It has evolved tremendously since February of 2022, and operators need to be flexible in their response to those changes or else that rigidity and unwillingness to change the way that they operate despite a changing risk environment is what will lead to the types of negative outcomes that they're trying to avoid right so that really brings me i guess to the the last question if we can go like into big picture mode here as you just referenced of course with everything that's happening in the middle east now with um you know iran and the us that's another area where we've seen extensive use of drones so these drone these these drones weapons are now they're not just a reality but they're they're everywhere people can afford them and they're doing a lot of damage what if you look at the big picture how much do you see this as something that is just going to be a permanent part of the air transport consideration i i think the the biggest thing is there there's going to have to be some kind of delineation between spillover from conflict related to drones and how that's dealt with, and then the drone sightings near airports.

23:34Matt Borie: And right now, I'm not sure that everyone has gotten the full picture that there's a difference between a drone and a drone, right? There's a drone that spills over from Ukraine into Polish airspace and needs to be dealt with by military forces, right? A drone being sighted near an airport in a part of Italy can't necessarily have the same response, but it does need some kind of response, right? As we saw with the hybrid warfare activity in Germany at Leipzig airport, even the small drones can potentially be very catastrophic in their impact if they're not managed appropriately. And so it's not going to be a one size fits all approach.

24:21Matt Borie: We've been able to do that with counterterrorism. I know that's a different topic, but take your shoes off, take your laptop out of your bag, put it through the scanner, provide advanced passenger information. You walk through the screening, you get your ID checked four times. You can't do that with a drone. You have something that shows up on a radar or something that was detected. And then you need to follow very specific steps after that to make a positive identification. And then even after a positive identification is made, you need to have steps on how you're going to deal with that situation.

24:59Matt Borie: We've done all this work on the counterterrorism side in aviation security to deal with improvised explosive devices, hijacking type situations, other forms of unlawful interference that can take place on an aircraft. And we've shared all this information and we've worked very hard since 9-11 as an industry to, while there are physical things that a passenger can see that go on, there's also coordination behind the scenes that is facilitated to ensure that that threat can be dealt with in the most effective way possible. The difficulty with drones is that it typically involves civil and military coordination in a way that isn't the same from a counterterrorism perspective in aviation security.

25:46Matt Borie: And because we deal with this conflict and spillover perspective, and even hybrid warfare, where you have state actors involved, it puts countries on a collision course in information sharing. We're not dealing with terrorists, so to speak, which everybody can get on board with in general to stop the threat from happening. Now it's, well, what side of the conflict are you on? Are you on Russia's side? Are you on NATO's side? Are you on Ukraine's side? Are you on Belarus' side? There's this intermixing of geopolitics with the drone threat that I don't think was there from a counterterrorism perspective when we dealt with the post-911 era.

26:23Matt Borie: So we need to look at the frameworks that were developed in post-911 for information sharing, for threat identification for mitigation measures, and then come up with a way that we can overcome some of the geopolitical impetus that has negated our ability to handle the drone threat in the same kind of way. Fascinating. In a sort of a fairly grim sort of way, it's a whole new world, isn't it? And it's interesting. I mean, here we are at the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. And I think, you know, I think you've made some very good points there about there were a lot of things learned from that of course but you've got to still keep adapting because everybody's adapting aren't they the the problem we face right now is there's been three airliners shot down since 2014 right and this the situations weren't all that different in in each each case uh and my view is if three airliners had been down by explosive devices in generally the same way since 2014 we would have a different approach to what's going on.

27:28Matt Borie: But again, the biggest issue with the conflict zone piece is these conflicts that we're dealing with, they're state versus state, right? This is not Iraq and Afghanistan in the global war on terrorism. And you have a defined enemy that's a terrorist group recognized by the United Nations, right? You have individual states and these conflicts are cross border and Russia, Ukraine isn't just affecting Russia, Ukraine, It's spillover into Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, right? It's Georgia. It's a conflict in the Middle East where you have how many countries and airspace airspaces are being affected.

28:09Matt Borie: And they all are supposed to share information with each other on how this is happening. Like Iran's not going to share information about when it's going to launch missiles and drones with Jordan. And there's three airspaces in between, hypothetically. depending on the way the missiles or drones were launched. They're not telling Saudi Arabia, oh, by the way, we're going to launch some missiles at Jordan and they might go through your airspace. That's what's supposed to happen technically, but we all know it's not. And so this type of conventional conflict makes the collaboration required to avoid a catastrophic event like the shoot down of an airliner much more difficult in a way that wasn't necessarily the case in a post 9-11 world where information sharing on counterterrorism was everybody's job and kind of understood that this is what we're going to do to keep air travel safe and secure.

28:56Matt Borie: There was a much more collaborative approach to that. I'm not saying it was perfect, but the collaboration this time, it's happening, but it's happening in silos where there's still this kind of good guy, bad guy. And overcoming that is hard because of the geopolitics. A lot of food for thought there, Matt. Thank you so much for joining us again. And thank you for your expert insights into this. I hope you'll join us again. I'm sure the issues are not going to go away. So keep coming back. Hopefully, peace has been achieved in one or many of these conflicts. And we'll talk about how to open back up in an airspace that's coming out of a conflict zone environment rather than discussing some of the impacts inside.

29:42Thank you. And also a thank you to our producers, Corey Hitt and Natalia Pelleo. and of course a huge thank you to you our listeners make sure you don't miss us by subscribing to window seat on apple podcasts or wherever you like to listen this is karen walker disembarking from window seat