India and China are discussing an air route over Hotan, in China's Xinjiang region, that would let Indian airlines fly around Pakistan, whose airspace has been shut to them for 17 months. "Discussions on the Hotan route are going on between the two countries," civil aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu told reporters on Tuesday, adding that the external affairs ministry was engaging with China. “Let us see how it goes, but we are trying alternatives.”
Naidu did not suggest that an agreement had been reached nor gave a timeline. If the talks succeed, flights from Delhi and Mumbai would head north towards Leh, enter Chinese airspace near Hotan, turn west towards Kyrgyzstan and join existing routes to Europe, the UK and North America.
The Pakistan's airspace hurdle
Airliners follow the shortest path over a curved Earth, called a great-circle route, which appears as a curve on a flat map. For flights from northern India to Europe and to much of North America, that path runs northwest across Pakistan.
{{/usCountry}}Airliners follow the shortest path over a curved Earth, called a great-circle route, which appears as a curve on a flat map. For flights from northern India to Europe and to much of North America, that path runs northwest across Pakistan.
{{/usCountry}}Pakistan closed its airspace to Indian-registered and Indian-operated aircraft on April 24, 2025, after the Pahalgam terror attack. India shut its own skies to Pakistani aircraft six days later. Since then, Indian airlines flying west from northern India have headed south over the Arabian Sea towards Muscat before turning northwest. The detour adds between 45 minutes and two hours of flying time.
Pakistan has renewed the ban over a dozen times. The latest notice, issued on September 16, runs to October 24, and each earlier notice was replaced before it expired.
The ban applies only to Indian aircraft, so foreign airlines still fly the direct path. On the Delhi-Istanbul sector, IndiGo's 6E-11 is scheduled to take 8 hours 39 minutes, according to flight-tracking data, while Turkish Airlines' TK717 is scheduled at 6 hours 45 minutes.
What the detour costs
A longer route burns more fuel, keeps crews and aircraft in the air longer and, on the longest flights, forces a stop to refuel. Campbell Wilson, then Air India's chief executive, said in October 2025 that the closure was causing an impact of ₹4,000 crore to the airline. According to Air India figures in November 2025, fuel costs had risen by as much as 29% and journey times by up to three hours on some long-haul routes.
The longest routes were hit hardest. In the first days of the ban, Air India's Delhi-Chicago flight, which had averaged 14 hours 47 minutes, took more than 19 hours including a fuel stop, according to Flightradar24. It suspended its Delhi-Washington service from September 1, 2025, citing a fleet retrofit and "the continued closure of airspace over Pakistan", which it said led to "longer flight routings and increased operational complexity".
The detour also leaves Indian airlines less competitive. Reuters reported that on a San Francisco-Mumbai journey, Lufthansa via Munich took only five minutes longer than Air India.
Pakistan is losing money too. Its defence ministry told the National Assembly that the ban cost it PKR 4.1 billion in overflight fees between April 24 and June 30, 2025.
Pakistan also shut its airspace after the Balakot air strikes in 2019, closing it to all civilian traffic from February 26 and fully reopening it only on July 16. Then India's civil aviation minister Hardeep Singh Puri told the Rajya Sabha that the closure had cost Air India ₹491 crore by July 2. The current ban has already lasted more than three times as long.
Also read: India explores alternate route through China's Xinjiang to bypass Pak airspace ban
Why look to China now
The Pakistani ban shows no sign of ending, and the southern detour has become harder to fly.
The war involving Iran began on February 28, 2026, and at least eight West Asian countries closed their airspace that day. According to OPSGROUP, an association that tracks operational risks for airlines, most foreign operators still avoid Iran, which is open only on restricted routes. Traffic between Asia and Europe now takes either a northern bypass through the Caucasus and Afghanistan, or a southern one through Oman, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where controllers in the Jeddah region are handling heavier traffic.
The Pakistani ban had already pushed Indian flights to Central Asia through Iran. In the first days of the ban, IndiGo's Tashkent-Delhi flight, which used to cross Pakistan in about 2 hours 18 minutes, flew through Iran and Turkmenistan and took about five and a half hours, according to Flightradar24. With Iran now largely avoided, the crowded southern route is the main way west left to Indian airlines.
Relations with Beijing have also thawed. Direct flights between India and China resumed on October 26, 2025, after a suspension of more than five years, when an IndiGo flight flew from Kolkata to Guangzhou.
Why Hotan is hard
Overflight is a right that has to be negotiated. Under the 1944 Chicago Convention, which governs international civil aviation, every country has "complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above its territory". A companion treaty agreed at Chicago, the International Air Services Transit Agreement, lets member states' airlines cross each other's territory. India and Pakistan are both parties, which has not stopped either from closing its skies to the other. China is not a party, so any right to cross Xinjiang has to be agreed directly between New Delhi and Beijing.
The terrain is the second problem. Reuters reported that the region is ringed by mountains of 20,000 feet (6,100m) and more. An airliner's cabin is pressurised so that passengers can breathe normally at cruising height. If it loses pressure, oxygen masks drop, supplied by chemical generators that typically last 12 to 20 minutes, and the pilots must descend to 10,000 feet or the lowest safe altitude for the area, whichever is higher, according to SKYbrary, the aviation safety knowledge base. Over peaks of 20,000 feet, a straight descent to breathable air is impossible. Airlines flying over such terrain have to plan escape routes in advance, which let the aircraft descend clear of the peaks before its passengers' oxygen runs out.
An engine failure poses a similar problem, since a twin-engine jet flying on one engine cannot hold its cruising height and needs a planned descent path that keeps it above the terrain.
The third problem is where to land in an emergency. International airlines generally avoid the area because it has few emergency airports, and no non-Chinese airline had used Hotan airport in the 12 months before November 2025, according to AirNav Radar flight-tracking data cited by Reuters.
The fourth is military. The airspace falls within the Chinese People's Liberation Army's Western Theatre Command, which Reuters described as "equipped with extensive missile, drone and air-defence assets" and whose responsibilities include responding to any conflict with India.
The fifth is the disputed border. Between Leh and Hotan lies Aksai Chin, a high plateau that China administers as part of Hotan prefecture and India claims as part of Leh district in Ladakh.
Mountains of up to 7,000m (23,000 feet) separate it from Indian-controlled Ladakh, and the Kunlun range separates it from the Tarim Basin, where Hotan lies. A direct track from Leh to Hotan would cross it.
How Indian airliners would fly over territory that India claims and China controls, and whose air traffic controllers would guide them, is not known. Neither government has said.
What a deal would change
A Hotan corridor would shorten the journeys that suffer most from the southern detour. "The route may lead to significant savings for destinations like Georgia, Baku, Central Asia, and northern Europe,” a person aware of the matter said. Naidu did not put a figure on the saving.
For now, the talks are at the stage of engagement, and Indian airlines are planning their schedules around a Pakistani notice due to expire on October 24.