Places Planes Can't Fly Over (And Why)

[00:00:00]Right now, as you're watching this, there are roughly 10,000 commercial aircraft in the sky. 10,000 planes. And if you pulled up a live flight tracker, you'd see them scattered across almost every inch of the globe. A constant moving web of metal [music] and jet fuel. But zoom in a little closer and you'll notice something strange. Certain parts of the map are completely empty.

[00:00:29]No planes. Not a single one. Some of those gaps are just oceans or deserts, but others others are deliberate. A pilot who crossed one of those lines wouldn't just get a warning. They might get shot down. Today, we're going to those places. The zones that are forbidden, dangerous, or just [music] physically impossible to fly over. And some of them will genuinely shock you because [music] a few of them are places you'd never expect. Let's get into it.

[00:01:02]Before we start, drop a comment telling me where you're watching this from. I want to see how many countries we've got in the comments. Number one, the Tibetan Plateau.

[00:01:13]Imagine you're sitting in seat 34A somewhere at 35,000 ft when the cabin [music] suddenly loses pressure. The oxygen masks drop from the ceiling. The pilots push the nose down immediately because that's the protocol. Get the plane below 10,000 [music] ft where the air is breathable. Do it fast. That procedure has saved countless lives. Except [music] there's one place on Earth where that emergency move might not save you at all. And that place isn't some remote war zone [music] or secret military corridor. It's one of the most geographically famous regions on [music] the planet. Tibet.

[00:01:57]The Tibetan Plateau has an average elevation of 14,370 [music] ft. Not a mountain top, not a peak, the average, the floor. To put that in perspective, >> [music] >> the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on Earth, stands at about 2,700 ft. The Tibetan Plateau is more than five of those stacked on top of each other, just as baseline terrain. So, when a pilot tries to descend [music] to 10,000 ft over Tibet, the math doesn't work. The ground is already above that. Descending to safety means flying into a mountain.

[00:02:37]There is no emergency option. There is no margin.

[00:02:41]And then, there's Mount Everest sitting inside this region at 29,032 ft, nearly as high as some commercial cruising altitudes. The Himalayas don't give you options. They take them away.

[00:02:56]But, altitude isn't even the biggest invisible [music] threat here.

[00:03:01]The cold is. At extreme altitude over Tibet, temperatures can plummet to -40°F.

[00:03:09]That number matters for a very specific reason. It's almost exactly the freezing [music] point of Jet A fuel, the standard aviation fuel used in most commercial aircraft. At that temperature, fuel doesn't just get cold, it starts to gel. It stops flowing.

[00:03:26][music] And if your fuel can't reach your engines, your engines stop.

[00:03:32]In 2008, [music] British Airways Flight 38 belly landed short of the runway at Heathrow because of this exact mechanic. [music] The plane hadn't even flown over Tibet. It flew over the less extreme freezing skies of Siberia and Mongolia, proving just how volatile freezing fuel lines can be. Tiny traces of water inside the fuel lines had turned to ice, blocking the flow, causing both engines to lose thrust just seconds before touchdown.

[00:04:03]Somehow, nobody died. That happened [music] over Siberia. Imagine what Tibet would do. Number two, volcanic airspace.

[00:04:15]Most people know volcanoes are dangerous on the ground.

[00:04:19]>> [music] >> But what most people don't realize is that a volcanic eruption can make an entire region of sky completely unsurvivable.

[00:04:28]And that danger can travel thousands of miles from the volcano [music] itself.

[00:04:34]Here's why.

[00:04:35]When a volcano erupts, it doesn't just shoot out lava. It blasts billions of tiny particles of pulverized rock, called volcanic ash, [music] into the atmosphere.

[00:04:48]These particles are razor sharp, invisible to the human eye, and they don't behave like normal clouds. They don't [music] dissipate the same way.

[00:04:58]And at altitude, they're catastrophic for jet engines.

[00:05:03]Here's what actually happens inside an engine when it hits volcanic ash, and it's stranger than most people realize.

[00:05:11]A modern jet engine [music] generates temperatures of around 2,000° F inside its core.

[00:05:19]Volcanic ash melts at roughly 1,800°.

[00:05:23]So when ash enters the engine, it melts into liquid glass, and then resolidifies on the turbine blades, coating them from the inside, choking the airflow, and killing the engine.

[00:05:37]On June 24th, 1982, British Airways Flight 9 was cruising at 37,000 ft near Indonesia when all four of its engines failed simultaneously.

[00:05:50][music] Not one, not two, all four.

[00:05:54]The Boeing 747, a machine that weighs over 400 tons fully loaded, became a glider. The crew had no power, no [music] options, and a dark ocean below them.

[00:06:08]As they glided completely powerless through the night, the cold air outside did something almost miraculous. It cooled the molten glass inside the engines until it solidified, cracked, and shattered completely off the blades.

[00:06:25]The crew managed to restart three of the four engines just [music] in time. The plane landed safely. No one died.

[00:06:33]But in January 2022, the Hunga Tonga underwater volcano erupted with such force that its ash cloud reached 190,000 feet, 36 miles into the mesosphere.

[00:06:48]Commercial [music] planes don't fly anywhere near that high. The ash still disrupted flights across the Pacific for days.

[00:06:56]Today, aviation authorities issue SIGMETs, significant meteorological information notices, whenever volcanic ash is detected in a flight corridor.

[00:07:07]Pilots reroute. Airlines absorb the fuel costs and the delays because the alternative is four dead engines over the ocean at midnight. Number three, [music] Mecca.

[00:07:19]Every no-fly zone we've covered so far exists because of physical danger.

[00:07:25]Frozen fuel, ash clouds, mountains that eat aircraft. Mecca is different. Here, planes stay away not because of missiles or mountain ranges, but because crossing the wrong line in the sky could offend more than a billion people. And that, it turns out, is more than enough.

[00:07:47]There's a claim that floats around online about this place, and it's worth addressing before we get to the real story.

[00:07:54]Some people claim planes physically cannot fly over Mecca due to a magnetic anomaly, that the Kaaba, the cubic structure at the center of the Grand Mosque, sits at the precise magnetic midpoint between the Earth's poles, causing [music] aircraft instruments to malfunction.

[00:08:13]That's not true. Security helicopters operate over the city regularly during the Hajj pilgrimage. Birds nest on the Kaaba itself. The magnetic anomaly story is a myth.

[00:08:27]The real reason is far simpler and far more profound. Non-Muslims are not permitted to enter Mecca at all, and that prohibition doesn't stop at the ground. In Islamic tradition, Mecca is considered the axis [music] between Earth and Heaven, with Heaven understood to sit directly above the Kaaba.

[00:08:48]Flying over it with non-Muslim passengers aboard is considered a sacrilege. So, airlines reroute. No negotiation, no exceptions. The airspace over Mecca is simply off the map, not because a radar says so, but because 1.8 billion people say so. That's a different kind of no-fly zone entirely.

[00:09:13]Number four, North Korea and conflict airspace.

[00:09:18]North Korea is by most measures the most unpredictable airspace on Earth.

[00:09:23]The country has a history of launching ballistic missiles without advanced notice, without filing a NOTAM. That's a notice to air missions, the system pilots use to flag hazards along a route. And without any regard for what might be in the way.

[00:09:39]In 2018, [music] North Korea reached an agreement with the International Civil Aviation Organization to provide warnings before launches.

[00:09:48]In May 2019, they resumed launches without any warning at all.

[00:09:53]By September 2020, >> [music] >> the US FAA had issued a formal prohibition banning all American commercial carriers from North Korean airspace entirely.

[00:10:04]But North Korea isn't even the most chilling example of what conflict airspace can do to a passenger flight.

[00:10:11]In 2014, [music] Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was cruising at 33,000 ft over Eastern Ukraine when it was struck by a surface-to-air missile.

[00:10:22]All 290 people on board were killed.

[00:10:26]The airspace had been restricted below 32,000 ft [music] due to the ongoing conflict in the region, but not above it. That single altitude gap cost nearly 200 lives.

[00:10:38]>> [music] >> After that, the aviation world fundamentally changed how it approaches flying over conflict zones.

[00:10:45]Today, airlines avoid Ukrainian, Russian, Iranian, Yemeni, [music] and Libyan airspace entirely adding thousands of miles to certain routes.

[00:10:56]A flight from London to Singapore [music] now takes significantly longer than it did a decade ago purely because of closed airspace.

[00:11:04]>> [music] >> Every extra mile is more fuel burned, more carbon emitted, higher ticket prices. The geopolitical chaos on the ground quite literally reshapes the sky above [music] it.

[00:11:18]We cover this kind of stuff regularly, the things that happen in the world that most people never stop to think about.

[00:11:24]If that sounds like your kind of content, the subscribe button is right there. No pressure, but you'll want to.

[00:11:31]Number five, Princess Juliana International Airport.

[00:11:36]Everything we've covered so far is invisible. Magnetic restrictions, political bans, ash clouds, zones you can't see and would never know you were in.

[00:11:49]This next one you can see coming from a mile away, literally.

[00:11:55]Princess Juliana International Airport on the island of Saint Martin in the Caribbean has one of the shortest major runways in the world [music] at just under 7,000 ft.

[00:12:07]That's tight, even for the aircraft it handles.

[00:12:11]So to hit that runway accurately, pilots have [music] to fly their approach at an angle that brings them in dangerously, almost comically low.

[00:12:21]How low?

[00:12:22]About 100 ft above the heads of beachgoers on Maho Beach.

[00:12:28]That's roughly the height of a 10-story building, except it's not a building.

[00:12:33]>> [music] >> It's a fully loaded commercial jet, engine screaming, moving at around 160 mph, passing directly over sunbathers who are lying on their towels watching it happen.

[00:12:47]The jet blast alone is violent enough to sandblast the skin off your arms >> [music] >> if you're standing at the fence.

[00:12:55]In July 2017, a woman was killed after being knocked backwards by jet [music] blast while holding on to that fence.

[00:13:04]People still come every single day because a shot of a plane passing overhead at 100 ft is one of the most visually spectacular things in aviation.

[00:13:16]For pilots, it's not a spectacle. It's a precision exercise with essentially zero room for error and people directly underneath the approach path.

[00:13:28]Welcome to the riskiest routine landing in commercial aviation. Number six, the Mirny Diamond Mine.

[00:13:37]In 1955, Soviet geologists discovered diamonds in the frozen ground of Siberia.

[00:13:44]Within a decade, they had carved out one of the largest man-made holes in the world, the Mirny Diamond Mine. At its peak, [music] it was producing 10 million carats of diamonds per year.

[00:13:57]The pit is roughly 4,000 ft wide and over 1,700 ft deep.

[00:14:04]There's a hole in Siberia so large that pilots are told to avoid flying over it.

[00:14:10]Not because it's restricted airspace, not because of missiles or governments, but because some aviation experts believe the hole itself could pull an aircraft out of the sky.

[00:14:23]Here's where the physics gets interesting.

[00:14:25]The mine closed in 2004, but the physics didn't. Deep holes trap and absorb heat.

[00:14:34]Even in Siberia's brutal winters, the air inside the Mirny pit is warmer than the air above ground. Warm air is less dense than cold air, so it rises constantly from the hole like an invisible chimney.

[00:14:49]When a helicopter transitions from flying through cold dense air over the surrounding tundra into the pocket of warm air rising from the mine, it experiences a sudden dramatic loss of lift. The rotors are designed to grip dense air.

[00:15:06]Pull them into thin air with no warning, and the aircraft [music] drops fast toward walls that plunge 1,700 ft straight down with no recovery room.

[00:15:18]You could drop the Empire State Building into this hole and not see the top. Then stack another one on top of that and still have room.

[00:15:28]No aircraft has gone down into the Mirny Mine, but the area is flagged. Pilots avoid it and the mine just sits there in the Siberian permafrost, an enormous silent man-made hazard with no fence around the sky above it.

[00:15:44]Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is respect a danger you've never tested.

[00:15:49]Number seven, Disney parks. Here's one that almost nobody sees coming.

[00:15:56]Walt Disney World in Orlando and Disneyland in Anaheim, California are the only two non-governmental locations in the United States with permanently restricted airspace. Not temporary, not event-based, permanent.

[00:16:13]The same category of airspace protection that covers the White House covers a theme park with a talking mouse.

[00:16:21]The way this happened is genuinely stranger than the restriction itself.

[00:16:26]The restrictions were originally pushed through Congress in 2003 under a post-9/11 security initiative called Operation Liberty Shield, the same framework that bans flights over any stadium with over 30,000 spectators during events.

[00:16:44]Disney parks can host over 100,000 visitors in a single day. The reasoning is crowd density. A security incident at that scale would be catastrophic.

[00:16:56]Any aircraft must remain at least 3,000 ft above the castles at both parks.

[00:17:02]Violators get intercepted. It made Disney's castles the only non-government landmarks with the same airspace protection as the Pentagon.

[00:17:12]And here's the part that makes this truly absurd.

[00:17:16]In 2015, Disney wanted to fly 50 illuminated drones over Sleeping Beauty's castle as part of a night time show. Sounds simple, but Disney is inside its own no-fly zone. They had to file a 42-page application with the FAA requesting special permission to fly toy drones over their own theme park.

[00:17:40]It took more than a year to get approved. The most powerful entertainment company on Earth filing paperwork for over 12 months just to fly some lights over their own backyard.

[00:17:53]Bureaucracy doesn't care how much your parks make. Number eight, Washington, D.C.

[00:18:01]If Disney's no-fly zone is the strangest, Washington, D.C.'s is the most serious.

[00:18:08]If you're a pilot flying anywhere near the U.S. Capitol, you're operating inside what's called a special flight rules area.

[00:18:17]A layered cage of restricted airspace surrounding the city with escalating levels of consequence the closer you get.

[00:18:25]The outer ring extends 33 miles from the city center.

[00:18:29]The inner ring, the severe restriction zone, covers [music] 15 miles.

[00:18:35]At its core, the White House, the Capitol, and the Pentagon.

[00:18:40]What happens if a plane crosses into that inner ring without clearance isn't quite what most people picture.

[00:18:47]Military intercept jets scramble, not eventually, immediately.

[00:18:52]F-16s can be airborne and alongside an intruder aircraft within [music] minutes.

[00:18:58]The fighter pilots will attempt radio contact, visual signals, wing rocking.

[00:19:03]If the aircraft doesn't respond, [music] the consequences escalate rapidly.

[00:19:09]And if the aircraft is considered [music] an imminent threat, lethal force is on the table.

[00:19:14]It's widely acknowledged, though officially unconfirmed, that the White House grounds are equipped with surface-to-air missile systems capable of engaging aircraft that cannot be stopped any other way.

[00:19:27]This is not theoretical. Post-9/11, the infrastructure was put in place specifically to prevent [music] a repeat of that morning.

[00:19:37]Since 2001, hundreds of aircraft have accidentally entered [music] DC restricted airspace. Mostly small private planes whose pilots didn't realize they'd crossed a line.

[00:19:49]Almost all were intercepted, escorted [music] down, and landed. Most pilots lost their license. A few faced federal prosecution. Yet, number nine, Area 51.

[00:20:04]Everything else on this list has a clear stated reason. Mountains, ash, religion, politics, crowds.

[00:20:12]>> [music] >> Area 51 gives you nothing. The facility, officially the Nevada Test and [music] Training Range, located about 83 mi northwest of Las Vegas, is one of the most secretive military installations on Earth. The restricted [music] airspace around it covers roughly 90,000 acres of sky. No civilian aircraft, no exceptions, [music] no explanations offered. What makes this zone genuinely different from every other restricted airspace is what happens when you approach the boundary.

[00:20:47]You don't get a government website explaining the rules. You get a radio call. A very calm, very firm voice telling you to turn around immediately.

[00:20:58]Multiple signs on the ground around the facility warn that deadly force is authorized against perceived threats.

[00:21:05]The FAA charts simply mark the area as restricted, end of discussion.

[00:21:12]The base is believed to be where the US developed and tested some of its most classified aircraft, the U-2 spy plane, the SR-71 Blackbird, early stealth technology.

[00:21:24]Pilots who accidentally encountered these experimental aircraft during test [music] flights reported objects moving in ways that seemed physically impossible, which fed decades of UFO speculation.

[00:21:38]The irony is the secrecy itself generated [music] more curiosity than any disclosure ever could.

[00:21:44]>> [snorts] >> We know almost nothing about what's currently happening at Area 51. [music] We know exactly where it is, and we know that the sky above it is one of the very few places on Earth where the rules are enforced with no room for interpretation.

[00:22:00]Whatever's up there, someone wants it to stay that way.

[00:22:05]Which of these surprised you most? Drop it in the comments. I genuinely read them, and I want to know which one got you. The sky feels infinite when you're looking up at it, but it's not.

[00:22:18]It's divided, regulated, restricted, and in some places genuinely lethal. Not because of anything dramatic, but because of physics, politics, religion, and history all stacking up in the same place at the same time.

[00:22:35]The reason your flight [music] takes the exact route it does isn't random. There are teams of people, decades of regulation, and in some cases centuries of human history that determined where that line on the map goes.

[00:22:51]Next time you're in a window seat watching the ground pass below, you're looking at the result of all of that.

[00:22:58]The places you're flying over, and the places you're very [music] deliberately not.

[00:23:03]Safe travels.

[00:23:05]If you made it this far, you're exactly the kind of person who's going to enjoy what else is on this channel.

[00:23:11]>> [music] >> Hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. And there's a playlist sitting on the screen right now. Pick any video. I promise it's worth the click. I'll see you there.