Pakistan extends the ban on Indian aircraft to 24 October

Pakistan on 16 September extended its airspace ban on Indian aircraft by another month. A Notice to Airmen issued by the Pakistan Airports Authority took effect at 10:45 that morning and runs until 04:59 on 24 October 2026. The previous extension would have lapsed on 24 September.

The text is blunt. Pakistani airspace is “not available for Indian registered aircraft and aircraft operated/owned or leased by Indian airlines/operators, including military flights.” The notice covers both of Pakistan’s flight information regions, Karachi (OPKR) and Lahore (OPLR). Those two FIRs are the whole of the country’s controlled sky.

India and Pakistan closed their airspace to each other’s airlines in late April 2025 after the Pahalgam attack in Indian-administered Kashmir, which killed 26 people. New Delhi blamed Pakistan. Islamabad denied the charge and answered with a package that included the airspace closure, announced on 24 April 2025. India imposed a matching ban. A US-brokered ceasefire in May 2025 stopped the shooting. It did not reopen the sky.

For airlines the cost is fuel and time. Westbound flights from north Indian airports that once cut across Pakistan toward Europe and North America now fly longer southern or far-northern tracks. Eastbound Pakistani and third-country flights that used Indian airspace do the same in reverse. The extra minutes compound on a daily bank of departures. Cargo that used the short overland air corridor pays the same penalty.

The latest NOTAM also keeps military aircraft out. That matters on a week when New Delhi has already summoned Pakistan’s chargé d’affaires over a collision between a Pakistani offshore patrol vessel and an Indian warship in the North Arabian Sea on the evening of 15 September. The air ban and the sea incident are separate files. They sit in the same stretch of weeks.

Nothing in the notice sets a test for lifting it. Each extension has been issued as a fresh time box rather than as a condition-based order. The 24 October date is therefore only the next expiry, not a promised reopening. Indian carriers have already rewritten schedules and fuel plans around a closed Pakistani FIR. Another month does not change the route map. It confirms that the April 2025 closure has become the working baseline, renewed in 30-day steps, 17 months on.

Civil aviation authorities on both sides will now file the new window with airlines and overflight contractors. Passengers will see it as a continued detour. Defence planners will see a sky that remains closed to the other country’s military traffic through late October. The NOTAM does not say what happens on 24 October. The pattern since April 2025 is that a new notice appears before the old one dies.