Through the Eye of the Needle
Regional conflicts have funneled the world's busiest air corridor into a single narrow passage. Nearly all flights between Europe and Asia now thread through the Caucasus - a geographic chokepoint located between war zones.
The closure of Russian airspace after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the subsequent intensification of conflict across the Middle East and Levant, pushed airlines onto a new path east: the Caucasus Corridor, threading above the Black Sea, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan and ultimately across the Caspian Sea. Despite remaining the safest corridor to cross from Europe to Asia, it is not without risk. The same conflicts that pushed traffic southward have also turned the region into one of the most GPS-disrupted airspaces.
Sampled flight records from January 2022, January 2024, and March 2026 illustrate how European carriers progressively rerouted their Asia traffic as the airspace landscape changed. Read more about how the flight corridors were identified here.
The Caucasus corridor
The Caucasus or Middle Corridor has remained open throughout the surrounding conflicts and is considered operationally safe. The term refers to the route crossing the Black Sea, continuing through Georgia and Azerbaijan, and in some routings via Armenia, before crossing the Caspian Sea toward Central Asia. At its narrowest point, the corridor measures approximately 136 km as The Telegraph reports, bounded by Russian-controlled airspace to the north and Iranian airspace to the south.
Traffic surges
After the Russian airspace closure, traffic through the Caucasus Corridor surged. The combined airspace over Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia handled around 30,000 flights per week on average in 2022. By 2024 that figure had nearly doubled to 55,000, and reached a peak at 57,000 weekly flights in 2025. 2026 shows a decline to around 49,000 weekly flights, likely reflecting a gradual shift toward the southern route.
Interference
As traffic through the corridor increased, so did recorded GPS interference events. GPS jamming works by overpowering satellite navigation signals with radio frequency, feeding navigation devices false position data. Deliberate GPS interference is now a standard tool of electronic warfare, aimed at disrupting drone and missile navigation but can equally affect civilian aircraft in conflict-adjacent regions, as previously reported. In 2025 and 2026, an average of 9% of flights traversing the Caucasus corridor reported GPS disturbances, three times the rate recorded in 2024. Interference peaked in January 2026, when close to one in six flights was affected.
Across the region
Georgia and Azerbaijan form the main gateway of the corridor. Weekly flights through Azerbaijani airspace more than doubled since 2022, peaking at a weekly average of 29,000 flights in 2025. Likewise, GPS interference intensified across all three countries, reflecting local conflict dynamics.
Interference waves
Early jamming over Azerbaijan and Armenia in 2022 and 2023 can likely be attributed to electronic warfare during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Since 2025, interference has escalated across the corridor as a whole. Georgia, situated near Russia's strategically significant Black Sea ports at Sevastopol and Novorossiysk, is particularly exposed to jamming systems deployed at those facilities. By 2026, Georgia records the highest sustained interference rate in the corridor, with a weekly average of 13.6% of flights affected. (Sources: Caucasus Watch, C4ADS)
A jammed chokepoint
The map view shows jamming data from GPSJam.org on August 18, 2025, during a particularly heavy jamming week in Georgia. In this week, interference covered almost the entire airspace over Georgia and Azerbaijan.
The timing is unlikely to be coincidental: On the night of August 18, Russia launched one of its largest drone and missile barrages in weeks against Ukraine, deploying 270 drones and 10 missiles in response to talks between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, as reported by ABC News.
Source: The White House What makes such heavy interference particularly dangerous in the Caucasus Corridor is the combination of high traffic density, narrow airspace, and limited diversion options. A flight entering Georgian airspace with a fully functional navigation system may encounter interference mid-route, showing false positioning data and forcing crews to revert to conventional navigation. This is possible for trained crews, but significantly more demanding in one of the world's most congested and constrained flight corridors.
The Caucasus Corridor will remain the primary passage for European aviation heading east for as long as Russian and Iranian airspace stay closed. In October 2025, the
International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) formally condemned Russia for repeated GPS interference, calling it a violation of the 1944 Convention on International Civil Aviation, which obliges signatory states to maintain secure air navigation and to which Russia is a signatory.
EASA and IATA have called for maintaining a minimum operational network of traditional navigation aids as a backup to GPS, as part of a joint mitigation plan published in June 2025 (EASA, 2025).
But regulatory condemnation has not stopped the jamming and backup navigation infrastructure across the South Caucasus remains sparse. For now, the challenges of the corridor are manageable. However, further escalation of conflict along its borders or even within the corridor, could push interference to levels that challenge the operational safety of the only viable route left. How safe that passage remains depends less on aviation protocol than on geopolitics.
Methodology
Flight route data was collected from the OpenSky Network, an open-access ADS-B aggregation project, for three one-week periods: 17–23 January 2022, 15–21 January 2024, and 16–22 March 2026, capturing the route landscape before the Russian airspace closure and at two points after. ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast) data captures position, altitude, and velocity signals that aircraft continuously broadcast via radio.
To produce smooth corridor lines, each flight was resampled to 60 waypoints. Flights were then grouped by airport pair and week, and clustered using KMeans on the midpoint latitude to separate structurally distinct routes. A median corridor was computed per cluster and smoothed with a rolling mean. For the Helsinki-Tokyo route ADS-B coverage over the Arctic is too sparse to reconstruct the route, so the corridor geometry was replaced with synthetic waypoints derived from verified flight tracking data (FlightAware, FIN61). All synthetic corridors are flagged in the underlying data.
GPSJam data was filtered to the Caucasus corridor, the airspace over Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, defined as a fixed set of H3 resolution-4 hex cells selected by manual geographic review, with each cell assigned to a country based on centroid location. Daily aircraft counts were aggregated to weekly totals per country, with the interference rate computed from weekly totals to weight higher-traffic days proportionally. The analysis covers 14 February 2022 to 17 May 2026.
For the hex-level interference map, the same data was used from GPSJam.org. Each H3 resolution-4 cell in the corridor was classified into one of three jamming levels based on the share of affected aircraft that day: good (<2%), medium (2–10%), or severe (>10%), following the interference threshold defined by GPSJam.org.