From cockpit to crisis: Aviation’s new security reality

Once a commercial challenge, the aviation fuel crisis is now a broader security risk, says Marco Chan, Senior Lecturer at Buckinghamshire New University, in a SJUK exclusive interview.

Could you introduce yourself and your role at the organisation?

I’m Marco Chan, Senior Lecturer in Aviation Operations and Programme Leader for the Pilot Training Programmes at Buckinghamshire New University.

Before academia, I spent nine years as an airline pilot in Hong Kong, flying Airbus A320/1 and A330/F aircraft on short and long-haul routes, including with Cathay Pacific.

My work now sits at the intersection of flight operations, airline strategy, aviation law and emerging technology.

I am involved in collaborative research with Sequetrics on AI-driven runway analytics, combining drone and satellite imagery for real-time runway condition monitoring and I supervise postgraduate and doctoral students working on operational resilience, safety management and pilot mental well-being.

I also commentate regularly on aviation matters for the BBC, Sky News, CNN and Reuters.

Is the fuel crisis still a commercial challenge or is it becoming a wider security issue?

It has moved decisively into the security category.

The commercial fallout is significant – with easyJet warning of a pre-tax loss of £540 to 560 million for the first half of 2026 and Lufthansa is accelerating the closure of its CityLine feeder airline.

But these are merely symptoms rather than the story.

The real story is twofold. First, this is not a market accident. It is a downstream effect of deliberate geopolitical action in the Strait of Hormuz.

The jet fuel price spike – from $96 per barrel in mid-February to roughly $197 by late March – acts as a strategic vulnerability indicator.

Second, when commercial routes “thin” due to fuel costs, we lose sovereign-function capabilities.

Medical evacuation and humanitarian logistics rely almost entirely on commercial aviation infrastructure. 

States cannot easily substitute when that infrastructure tightens.

Aviation has quietly become critical national infrastructure while operating on commercial-sector margins and with limited resilience.

That mismatch is the core national security vulnerability.

With so much fuel moving through the Strait of Hormuz, how vulnerable is aviation?

Hormuz carries an aviation-heavy exposure that other chokepoints like Suez, Bab el-Mandeb and Malacca do not.

Roughly 25 to 30% of global jet fuel transits the Strait.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned that Europe’s remaining jet fuel supply is measured in weeks if flows do not recover.

Operationally, the resulting re-routing is creating a “concentration effect”.

By avoiding Iranian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Syrian, Kuwaiti and Israeli airspaces, carriers are funnelling traffic through the Caspian corridor or via Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

This adds up to 800 nautical miles and up to $60,000 in costs per long-haul sector.

Dangerously, this creates a single-point-of-failure. Saudi overflight traffic has doubled to 1,400 daily movements.

If the Caspian corridor were disrupted now, the entire East-West long-haul network would cascade into a standstill simultaneously.

Is there a risk of knock-on effects like cyber-attacks or coordinated disruption?

Absolutely, we are tracking two distinct propagation risks. The first is software supply chain concentration.

The April 2026 cyber-incident targeting European hubs and 2024 CrowdStrike event proved – that while we have built redundancy into aircraft systems, we haven’t built it into the “back office” software stack.

A single vendor fault can ground thousands of flights globally.

The second risk, which concerns me more from the cockpit, is Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) interference.

International Air Transport Association (IATA) safety data shows a 193% increase in jamming and spoofing since 2023.

By March 2026, more than 700 flights in Gulf corridors reported suspected spoofing.

In these cases, the Flight Management System (FMS) accepts a “plausible” but false position.

Unlike ransomware, which disrupts the business, spoofing reaches the cockpit and directly challenges flight safety.

How prepared is the industry for a more prolonged period of instability in the aviation sector?

Honestly, the industry’s resilience model was built for commercial shocks, like the pandemic, but not sustained adversarial disruption.

We are now facing a “polycrisis” with supply disruption, degraded airspace, navigation interference and cyber-pressure all arriving concurrently against a 3.9% net margin buffer.

Preparedness is unevenly distributed. Larger flag carriers have the balance sheets to survive.

But regional and leasing-heavy operators do not – and are likely to thin schedules or withdraw from marginal routes first.

The connectivity most at risk involves smaller European markets, regional African networks and emerging-economy links – routes that often carry more strategic and diplomatic weight than their passenger numbers suggest.

Could confidence in flying be affected if the situation escalates further?

Passenger confidence is surprisingly robust, but the system is variable.

What erodes trust isn’t the threat itself, but the uncertainty caused by over 27,000 cancellations logged in early 2026.

Uncertainty stresses rebooking systems, strains customer service and pressures communication.

I believe safety-adjacent issues, such as GNSS spoofing, deserve more public transparency.

In aviation, candour is always more durable than silence.

When airlines stop being transparent about why delays are happening, they lose trust faster than they can recover it.

How can the industry better prepare for disruptions and cost spikes in the future?

I see three operational priorities:

1. Strategic fuel reserves: We must treat fuel as strategic infrastructure. The European Commission’s move toward mandated reserve quotas and geographically distributed production is essential
2. Software audits: The industry must audit single points of failure in the software supply chain with the same rigour we apply to mechanical parts
3. Invest in people: During cost spikes, the temptation is to trim training budgets and crew buffers. This is a false economy. The carriers that survive these crises are those with the deepest operational expertise in the cockpit, ops centre and training room