Do countries get paid for using their airspace?
Yes, aviation authority of countries charge the airlines for using their airspace. Civil aviation navigation services are one of the highest revenue grossing businesses operated by governments. I can explain how the airlines get charged for using Indian airspace.
This is the approx ATC map of the subcontinent.
Before we proceed, few things I want to mention here.
- All ATCs which don’t cover oceanic routes will have boundaries that are equivalent to political borders. For example, the Nepal ATC and Indian ATC don’t overlap. Their coverage is pretty much limited to their international borders.
- As per United Nations rule, maritime or oceanic border of a country extends upto 200nm (or 370km) from its coast. As per the map, Indian ATC covers way beyond its maritime border. This doesn’t mean that all the area covered by Indian ATC belongs to Indian airspace. Mumbai ATC is the best example.
Indian airspace sees heavy air traffic for two routes:
- China to Middle East: Hong Kong to Dubai, Shanghai to Doha, Beijing to Abu Dhabi, etc. For these flights, Indian airspace will start somewhere in Arunachal Pradesh and end somewhere 300km off the coast of Gujarat. Similarly for the return flights also.
- South East Asia and Australia to Europe: Singapore — London, Australia — Paris, etc. For these flights, Indian airspace will start from Andaman Islands and end somewhere in Indo-Pak border near Rajasthan/Punjab.
Both of these routes have about 2500km of distance within the Indian airspace excluding region outside the maritime borders.
Now, every flight within Indian airspace, whether it’s domestic or international, has to pay Route Navigation Facilities Charges (RNFC) to Airport Authority of India which operates these ATCs. This charge depends on the weight of the aircraft and the distance it covers within Indian airspace. The formula for RNFC for overflying is
where
R is a fixed service rate of 5600Rs
W is the weight factor
AUW is the all-up-weight of the aircraft, it’s the weight of the aircraft at any point of time during the flight measured in kgs.
D is the distance factor
GCD is the great circle distance in Nautical Miles. In simple terms, GCD is the aerial distance between two points. (It’s not same as the distance between two cities via road. For example, Bangalore to Delhi road distance is about 2200km, but via air it’s about 1700km. You can measure this aerial distance on Google Earth).
Since, we’re going to calculate airspace space for overflying international flights, we should consider long-haul aircrafts only, which can operate between the cities I mentioned before. These airplanes are mostly Airbus A330, Airbus A350, Boeing 777 or Boeing 787 whose AUW will be around 250 tons on an average.
Considering the average Indian airspace distance span of 2500km, we can calculate RNFC as
RNFC = 5600 × √(1350nm/100) × √(250000/50000) ≈ 46000 Rs or 700$
This is just the charge for navigation services within maritime borders, if we consider area beyond maritime border it will reach 50000 Rs.
Now, this is the charge for a single flight. But there’ll be hundreds of international flights passing through Indian airspace everyday. Assuming the worst case, 100 flights in 24 hour time period. Of course, it’ll be much more than 100.
So, the revenue earned for 100 flights, 100 × 50000 = 50 lakh rupees.
If we consider the return leg for each flight, it would become 1 Crore Rs/day or 140,000$/day
You can see, how much a government can earn just by using its airspace.
If anyone is interested in knowing India’s ATC coverage, please check this document shared by Air Traffic Controllers Association of India (ATC Guild). Looks complicated but worth a look.
