The headline facts are straightforward but consequential. On 3 May 2025 a Boeing 737-200 cargo aircraft operated by IBM Airlines (reg. 5Y-CKD) was destroyed at Nyala Airport in South Darfur after Sudanese forces concluded it was carrying military supplies to the Rapid Support Forces. Multiple investigative and reporting outlets recorded the loss of the aircraft and fatalities on board.
Kenya responded with a formal mechanism to review incidents involving Kenyan-registered or -operated aircraft in neighbouring conflict theaters. In mid-May the Kenyan government announced a multi-member team to examine preliminary accident reports and related operations in South Sudan and Somalia. That step frames the regulatory question that now matters for aviation safety and for states seeking to stem the flow of materiel into active conflicts.
Why this matters for regulators and airlines. Carriers and charter brokers operate in a complex legal field that overlaps: civil aviation safety rules, state export and arms-control law, insurance market decisions, and unilateral state directives about overflight or landing into areas of armed conflict. Existing civil aviation frameworks already expect operators to perform dynamic, intelligence-informed risk assessments before operating to or over conflict zones. The European Union has institutionalised that approach through a conflict zone alerting and information system and EASA conflict zone bulletins, while ICAO guidance documents set risk assessment expectations for States and operators. Those frameworks create the legal and practical scaffolding that regulators can use to recommend or to prohibit operations into specific zones.
But guidance is not the same as an enforceable ban. The practical levers available to States and regulators include: (a) formal prohibitions on operators that lack a valid safety case for a route or that operate aircraft banned domestically; (b) targeted prohibitions on carriage of cargo with a potential military end use unless authorised under export controls and accompanied by verifiable end user documentation; and (c) market mechanisms such as insurers refusing to underwrite flights into a given airport or route, effectively grounding commercial activity by increasing commercial risk. The Nyala case underlines how those levers can be activated after an incident, but it also shows limits to ex post enforcement where lives and reputations have already been lost.
Operational and legal gaps exposed by the IBM Airlines episode. First, thin oversight of ad hoc cargo charters and opaque brokerage chains make it difficult for regulators to trace whether a flight carries declared humanitarian cargo or materiel intended for combatants. Second, state-level export controls and embargo regimes are only as effective as the verification procedures applied at origin and trans-shipment points. Third, insurance markets and underwriters do act as de facto regulators through premium spikes and refusals to cover certain routings, but that market discipline can lag or be uneven across jurisdictions. Finally, domestic regulatory action against an operator or an airframe is sometimes limited by registry complexity and cross-border commercial arrangements, which allowed an aircraft that had previously been banned from operating in one State to reappear on fragile routes elsewhere.
What harmonised policy should look like. There are three practical, implementable steps regulators and industry should adopt now.
1) Clear prohibition plus certification requirement for military end use cargo. States should adopt rules that ban carriage of cargo that is plausibly for military or dual end use into active conflict zones unless the operator can produce a certified export licence, authenticated end user certificate, and evidence of lawful authorisation. This is enforceable, administrable, and consistent with export control practice in other sectors.
2) Mandatory pre-flight risk attestations linked to the operator’s safety oversight record. Operators should be required to file a documented, auditable risk assessment when proposing flights into or to airfields inside conflict zones. Regulators should deny or suspend permits where the operator lacks appropriate security controls or where the aircraft has a recent history of detentions or serious regulatory findings. The Kenyan review team model is a start but must translate into preventive, not only investigative, powers.
3) Faster intelligence sharing and an international blacklist for brokers or operators credibly tied to diversion of materiel. EASA and ICAO platforms show that an information exchange architecture already exists for overflight risk. That architecture needs to be widened to include cargo provenance data and commercial intermediary vetting so aviation authorities can act before an aircraft is lost or a shipment diverts into a conflict supply chain.
Practical steps for airlines and operators. Charter operators should stop accepting consignments with ambiguous documentation bound for active frontlines. Airlines must embed export-control compliance and end-user verification into their acceptance processes and strengthen contractual liability clauses. Insurers and lessors should condition support on demonstrable compliance with those processes.
A closing legal point. Outright state bans on all civil operations into a sovereign State can be blunt instruments. Better targeted measures that make the carriage of military end-use cargo illegal and that give regulators tools to suspend operators with suspicious operational patterns will be more effective and faster to implement. The balance regulators must strike is between preventing carriers from becoming conduits for weapon flows and maintaining legitimate humanitarian and diplomatic air links in fragile theatres.
The IBM Airlines incident will be referenced in regulatory reviews for years. If regulators, insurers, and operators treat it as a policy failure worth fixing, the follow-up should produce clearer rules on who may carry what into conflict zones and robust mechanisms to enforce those rules before another aircraft becomes a target.