Why do planes not fly over Tibet? 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.

Why Do Planes Not Fly Over Tibet?
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.

Why do planes not fly over Tibet?
Why do planes not fly over Tibet?
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.

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

the geographic region in the world, and earning it the nickname the roof of the world the nickname is aptly deserved because of the roof of the world.

Why do planes not fly over Tibet?
Why do planes not fly over Tibet?
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 Kunming.

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 and1 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.

Why do planes not fly over Tibet?
Why do planes not fly over Tibet?
the loss in life for the allied aircrews 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 Lhasa was built a decade later in 1965.
today there are two significant international airports located on the tibetan plateau

in lahasa and joining 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.