Hello, I'm Simon Gorda and you're listening to the Independence Travel podcast on Thursday, the 24th of February, the day, of course, when Russia invaded Ukraine.

Very quickly after military operations were launched, the Ukraine Air Navigation Service said that all air space was closed.

We've since seen the European Union Air Safety Agency, EASA, say that they advise airlines to stay at least 100 nautical miles away from the border areas in Belarus and in Russia.

Moldova has closed its airspace and if you look at a map of the European flight operations on a site such as flight radar, you will see

that there is a gaping void right over Ukraine and the surroundings as airlines steer clear.

Remember, of course, that in 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was flying over

eastern Ukraine on a routine scheduled flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was blown

out of the sky by a missile fired from rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine.

From the passengers' point of view, you may well be feeling very uncertain about travelling.

I'm speaking to you from Melbourne and I'm fairly sure that my flight will take a

path going over Russia as many flights are doing as we speak and British Airways operating

routinely today from Heathrow to Moscow and back, and that will continue.

In the longer term, it is entirely possible that Russia may, in retribution against Western

sanctions, say that you cannot fly aircraft over our airspace.

Russia, of course, the biggest country in the world.

And the effect of that would be to force airlines to take much more divergent flight paths,

which will add many, many hours to the journey and cost them a great deal in fuel and cause all kinds of problems in terms

of operations. We're a long way from that at the moment, but it is one of the possible outcomes.

It's also very likely that airlines will see bookings collapse.

That's exactly what happened after the first Gulf War,

the invasion to try to reclaim Ukraine.

Actually, this was Operation Desert Storm, began 31 years almost to the hour before the Russian

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