Civil aviation infrastructure is often treated as a neutral, apolitical public good. In practice it occupies the seam where civilian life, state authority, and military logistics meet. That seam becomes a fault line when states fracture. Airports and parked aircraft are vulnerable in ways that are operational, legal, and humanitarian. Policymakers and operators must stop treating each incident as an isolated tragedy and instead harden regimes of prevention, contingency and legal accountability.

Khartoum is a convenient focal point for this discussion because its airport exemplifies the dual-use character common to many capital aerodromes. Khartoum International has long served both commercial traffic and state aviation needs. The airport has also been the site of serious peacetime accidents that revealed weaknesses in infrastructure resilience and emergency response. The 2008 Airbus A310 disaster in Khartoum underlined that when an airport’s emergency systems, communications and contingency planning are strained the human toll can be high. Those lessons matter in conflict too, because the operating envelope for safe evacuations, firefighting and aircraft salvage narrows dramatically under fire.

Beyond Khartoum, recent decades offer clear empirical precedent. In Libya during and after 2011 multiple parked airliners were burned and written off amid fighting for control of Tripoli’s airports; operators and states found themselves without the ability to relocate assets, and insurance and liability became messy after the fact. In Yemen, air raids and ground fighting rendered Sanaa airport partially unusable at various points and destroyed aircraft on the ramp. Civil operators lost aircraft and sustained business interruption losses that raised questions about state responsibility and compensation. In Syria, the fighting around Aleppo and other cities led to suspension of civilian services and to airports being used for military logistics, which in turn made them targets and reduced their availability for humanitarian evacuation.

Those patterns point to three practical vulnerabilities. First, parked aircraft are immobile, fragile and highly flammable. In a contested airport apron a single rocket, mortar round or incendiary can destroy multiple airframes in minutes. That creates immediate safety problems for passengers and crews who may be on board or in terminal buildings, and it creates long term capacity problems for the national carrier and for regional connectivity.

Second, the joint civil military character of many airports complicates protection. An aerodrome that supports military operations may lawfully become a military objective under international humanitarian law if it is used to make an effective contribution to military action. But the converse is also true: the mere proximity of military assets to civilian infrastructure does not erase the protections that IHL affords to civilian objects. States and belligerents therefore face both operational and legal obligations to avoid disproportionate or indiscriminate attacks. When combatants treat airports as prize targets or when they operate within civilian terminals they increase the risk of unlawful harm and of lengthy closure.

Third, information and coordination failures multiply risk. Operators and overflying carriers rely on timely NOTAMs, reliable air traffic services, and transparent risk assessments. Since the MH17 tragedy there has been increased industry focus on conflict-zone risk assessment and on making the NOTAM and other warning systems more fit for purpose. ICAO and industry task forces have pushed for better regional risk exchange mechanisms so that operators can make defensible safety decisions about overflights and diversion planning. Those mechanisms matter not only for en route safety but also for deciding whether to attempt to reposition aircraft from an at-risk apron.

Legal exposure is real and addressable. States have obligations under both aviation law and the law of armed conflict. Article 3bis of the Chicago Convention and related norms demand that states refrain from using force against civil aircraft in flight; international humanitarian law protects civilian objects except where they become bona fide military objectives. When aircraft are destroyed on the ground because of direct targeting, misidentification, or indiscriminate attacks, affected carriers and states are left seeking financial recovery through insurance, bilateral claims, or international fora. Practical, prearranged procedures for fast investigation, evidence preservation and claims processing would reduce post-conflict legal chaos.

Operationally there are immediate steps authorities and operators can take to reduce exposure.

  • Contingency-driven relocation. Where intelligence indicates rising political violence, civil aviation authorities should have preapproved plans and overflight permissions to transfer at-risk aircraft to alternate airfields. Relocation requires coordination on slots, handling and crew logistics, but the cost is almost always lower than the write-off of an aircraft.

  • Hardened firefighting and runoff mitigation. Aprons and adjacent terminal surfaces can be configured to minimize spread of fuel-fed fires and to protect critical ground-support equipment. Training airport firefighting units for operations under degraded security conditions must be routine.

  • Clear dual-use protocols. Where military aircraft or equipment operate from civil aerodromes, clear declarations and transparent boundaries should be established so that IHL protections remain usable and so that operators can assess risk without political ambiguity.

  • Fast evidence preservation and access. Early, secure documentation of damage via geolocated imagery and safeguarded black boxes or maintenance logs avoids later disputes about causation. Agreements with neutral international investigators protect chain of custody.

  • Insurance and contractual realism. Government and carriers must review war-risk insurance policies and ensure cargo, hull and third party coverage include scenarios of internal armed conflict. In some cases governments should pre-negotiate stop-gap compensation mechanisms to enable continuity of essential air services during recovery.

At the policy level the international community needs to improve the predictability of response. ICAO, IATA and regional safety bodies have advanced tools for conflict risk assessment, but implementation is patchy. States should make contingency planning a statutory requirement for major airports and coordinate those plans with civil contingency bodies, armed forces and neighboring ANSPs. A harmonized regional approach to issuing conflict-related NOTAMs and to setting temporary ATS corridors reduces the chance that a commercial aircraft will be caught in crossfire because of conflicting or late information.

Finally, accountability matters. When airports and aircraft are damaged in the course of hostilities the human and economic costs can be vast. International law provides tools for apportioning responsibility. The international community should support neutral fact-finding, preserve evidence for possible future reparations, and insist that parties to a conflict respect the longstanding rule that civilian transport and its users are not legitimate military targets absent clear, contemporaneous military use.

Khartoum, Libya, Yemen and Syria show that the consequences of failing to prepare extend beyond the field of play. Airframes are not merely metal and composite; they are mobility, commerce and lifelines for civilians and aid. For states and operators the calculus is simple: invest now in contingency and legal clarity or accept a much higher cost later in lives, infrastructure and reputational capital.