‘Where do we go?’ What it’s like being an airline pilot when missiles start crossing your flight path

‘The first thing is: Where are we? And how much fuel have we got and where do we need to go?’, Australian veteran pilot says Keith Tonkin has flown a Boeing 747 towards airspace where missiles were being fired, and knows the pressure pilots have been under this week. “You’re stuck in that airplane until you land safely,” the veteran Australian pilot says. Amid the expanding war in Iran – with missiles piercing the skies over the Middle East – pilots’ regimented routes have been thrown into chaos. They’ve been forced to turn planes around mid-flight or squeeze into narrowing air corridors, with hundreds of lives in their hands. “They’ll be seeing more aeroplanes around them than they would have experienced in the past,” Tonkin says of the commercial pilots affected by conflict. “When the airspace is congested, and you’ve got less room to manoeuvre, if something goes wrong, you have fewer options.” Airspace was closed on Saturday, after the US and Israel launched strikes and Iran retaliated with a barrages of missiles across the Middle East. Airborne planes diverted to the nearest airports available. The mass disruption was a stark difference to the one-