A modern airliner cruising at 38,000 feet is, from the point of view of a surface-to-air missile battery, a large, slow, predictable radar return. Everything that keeps it safe is procedural: the crew knows where not to fly, and the people with the missiles know what not to shoot at.

On 2 September the International Civil Aviation Organization published a statement saying, in the politest possible institutional language, that this arrangement is under more strain than at any time in living memory.

The UN agency called on all 193 of its member states to do more to protect civil aircraft in and near conflict zones, and named the technologies that worry it most.

What ICAO actually said

The statement is short and unusually direct for an organisation that normally speaks in annexes.

ICAO went on to say it is observing an increased risk that civil aircraft may become targets or be caught in crossfire — and, importantly, that the industry’s ability to reroute is not a solution.

Pourquoi maintenant ?

The timing is not coincidental. The same day the statement appeared, Ukraine formally told ICAO that Russian airspace is not safe for civil aviation because of increased military activity, and urged operators to avoid it.

That followed a warning from President Volodymyr Zelensky that Russian skies were becoming dangerous and would in effect close. Aeroflot shares fell more than five percent. Moscow’s airports shut for a second consecutive night on 3 September. Russia’s civil aviation authority called Ukraine’s warning illegitimate.

Elsewhere the picture is no calmer. EASA has extended its Conflict Zone Information Bulletin for the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman through 30 September, rating risk to civil aviation as high across airspace managed by Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE, because of missiles, drones, combat aircraft and air defences.

The law already says this

What makes the statement striking is that none of it is new law. Article 3 bis of the Chicago Convention — added after the Soviet shoot-down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983 — already prohibits the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight. Assembly Resolution A42-4 reaffirmed it.

The problem is that a prohibition only works if everybody involved knows an airliner is an airliner. That is why ICAO’s three asks are all about information rather than rules: share threat intelligence quickly, assess risk faster, and get military and civil authorities talking to each other so that a transponder-squawking widebody does not get read as something else.

Speaking earlier this year at the World Overflight Risk Conference in Valletta, ICAO’s secretary general put the underlying issue plainly.

What changes for passengers

In the short term, probably nothing visible. Airlines already avoid the worst airspace, which is why flights between Europe and Asia now take routes that would have looked absurd a decade ago, and why fuel burn and crew hours have gone up across the industry.

The longer-term significance is that ICAO is updating the two manuals that actually govern how authorities, airlines and air navigation service providers assess these threats. Manuals are unglamorous. They are also the documents that determine whether a dispatcher in Frankfurt files a route through contested airspace tomorrow morning.

ICAO cannot compel anyone. It has no army, no inspectors with the power to close airspace, no ability to punish a state that fires on an airliner. What it has is a convention that every one of those 193 states has signed, and a habit of saying uncomfortable things out loud. On 2 September it said one.

Sources: International Civil Aviation Organization, aeroTELEGRAPH, Ukrainian National News, Inside GNSS, EASA, Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.