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airplanes can travel for thousands of
kilometers across the world
rockets have landed men on the moon and
elon musk wants to land men on mars
within the next couple years
the world has been made so small by us
that it's easy to overlook some of the
forgotten parts
for example airplanes are traveling
through the skies pretty much
everywhere on earth at all times but
if you were to open up a live global air
traffic map
right now and pan over to asia you'll
see
nothing over this massive area of the
continent
regardless of whenever you do this it
always appears that all of the world's
airplanes are simply avoiding this huge
area and going
out of their way to fly around it like
it's some kind of forbidden zone to
travel over or fly through and it's not
like this is the middle of the ocean
this is a huge area of land directly
over asia the world's most heavily
populated continent
so why is this happening well there's a
lot of reasons but before we get into
that
you need to know about some aviation
history in the region the dead zone in
question is over a geographic region
known as the tibetan plateau and it's
one of the world's
biggest wastelands after antarctica and
northern greenland the tibetan plateau
is the least hospitable place for humans
to live in the entire world and is the
most sparsely populated it's an area
that's over five
times larger than france but only has a
population
of a little over 14 million people
across the seven countries that it spans
over
so few people live here because the
plateau's average elevation
is over 4 500 meters tall
making the tibetan plateau the highest
geographic region in the world and
earning it the nickname
the roof of the world the nickname is
aptly deserved because the roof of the
world
has been one of the world's biggest
obstacles to aviation for decades
the first large-scale attempt to fly
across the plateau
was during the second world war when the
allies in what was then british india
needed to airlift supplies into china to
assist them in the fight against the
japanese the route wasn't especially far
simply from eastern india into kunmeng
in china a distance of just a little
over 840 kilometers
but because they were flying over the
remote mountains and
high steps of the tibetan plateau the
pilots faced extremely violent
turbulence
wind speeds up to 200 miles per hour
temperatures cold enough to freeze their
fuel
implement weather events that were
difficult to predict and almost no
emergency airports that they could
divert to
in the event of an accident let alone
the occasional intervention of japanese
fighters
all of these hazards added up to an
incredibly dangerous flight path that
over the time span of 42
months saw 594 planes and
1 659 men who were lost in the mountains
never to be seen again the vast majority
of these losses were a simple result
of the dangerous elements the pilots
were flying through and
not a result of enemy action and for
reference
the loss in life for the allied air
crews here was even higher than during
the entire battle of britain
against the germans in some months as
many as
50 percent of all allied planes that
flew the route were crashing which would
obviously
not exactly be an acceptable loss rate
to a modern airliner today
luckily for the modern airliners the
tibetan plateau has been gradually
opened up in the decades since the
second world war
the first airport in chinese tibet was
built in 1956
and the modern airport in the tibetan
capital lahasa was built a decade later
in 1965.
today there are two significant
international airports located on the
tibetan plateau
in lahasa and jining both of these
airports primarily handle domestic air
travel to and from the rest of china
but lahasa has a single international
flight to kathmandu
while zhening maintains flights to
taipei tokyo and kuala lumpur
so it's true that there sometimes are
planes flying over the tibetan plateau
in modern times but almost every
international flight between eastern
asia and the west
will go out of their way to avoid flying
over it take this flight
this flight or this flight just as a
handful of examples so now that we've
gone through some history lessons
why do most airliners continue to avoid
flying over tibet
on their longer flights today despite
the existence of modern international
airports and
you know being able to actually fly over
the mountains it ultimately comes down
to
four primary reasons that we're going to
go through the first of which
is the stupidly huge risk during
emergency situations
think about it like this the average
elevation of the tibetan plateau
is well over 14 000 feet and airliners
usually
cruise at over 30 000 feet normally not
a problem but under certain
critical emergency situations like a
cabin depressurization
or engine failure event airline protocol
is to descend
down to 10 000 feet in a cabin
depressurization scenario the plane will
drop
oxygen mask for passengers to breathe
but there's only a limited supply
generally only around 20 minutes this is
intended to be enough time for the
passengers to last breathing on
while the plane descends down to 10 000
feet where normal breathing conditions
can be resumed
now obviously this isn't possible
anywhere over the vast tibetan plateau
that's over five times the size of
france because the
average elevation is over fourteen
thousand feet
meaning that if a plane descended down
to ten thousand feet as protocol demands
it would almost certainly crash into the
side of a mountain
and everyone would die if a cabin
depressurization happens over tibet
the only nearby major international
airport safe enough
and close enough for most big airliners
to divert to in an emergency
are la hassa jining kathmandu chengdu
urumki
and almady these airports are all
hundreds or thousands
of kilometers away from each other and
they mostly ring around the uninhabited
plateau
when a plane flies from kathmandu to
lahasa for example
kathmandu and lahasa are each the
alternate emergency airport in addition
to being the destination in 2018
a sichuan airlines flight was flying
from chongqing to lahasa
across the plateau at 30 000 ft when a
window blew out and it suffered a
depressurization event
fortunately the pilots weren't very far
across into the plateau so they were
able to quickly turn around
and divert to the airport at chengdu for
an emergency landing within 35
minutes of the depressurization
happening the deeper an emergency like
this happens into the plateau
the more dangerous the emergency becomes
because of how far
away you can get from any airports to
divert to leading to longer times
up in the air without any oxygen this
leads us into problem number two for why
airplanes don't fly over tibet
there's just nobody that really lives
there so there isn't really a very big
demand
long-haul international flights between
europe and asia will avoid flying over
tibet because they don't want to risk
having an emergency situation while
flying over it
but there aren't that many shorter
domestic flights either because there's
just so few people there
the tibet autonomous region in china has
just a little over
3 million people who live across the
entire massive
area meaning that despite tibet taking
up almost 13
of china's total land it only accounts
for
0.2 percent of china's total population
the next two reasons why long-haul
flights avoid flying over tibet are bad
turbulence and the risk of jet fuel
freezing
when fast winds move across the plateau
and the mountains the wind will often
take a wave-shaped pattern that looks
like this
and when airplanes fly through this wind
pattern the turbulence can get extremely
bumpy which can further complicate any
emergency scenarios
and finally there's the problem of jet
fuel theoretically
jet fuel freezes when the temperature
gets below minus 40 celsius
and while extremely cold conditions like
that rarely take place anywhere the jets
fly
the temperatures in the air above the
already high and cold tibetan plateau
can get to that point or worse this
isn't really a problem for a short
flight through
but for longer flights across the
plateau that might last for six hours or
more
this can become a really significant
problem ultimately
the big reason why airplanes almost
always avoid flying over the tibetan
plateau to get to their destinations
isn't because of any supernatural curse
or something like that but a simple
reality that if they were to experience
an emergency while flying across
it would perhaps be the most dangerous
place anywhere over the inhabited
earth's continents
to experience it it's a reminder that
despite how advanced
connected safe and small our world may
seem
there's still a few wild and remote
areas left that are
dangerous for us to travel through if
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