Several airlines, including Saudi Arabian Airlines and Emirates, suspended flights to Pakistan on Wednesday after the South Asian nation closed its air space following heightened tensions with neighboring India. Etihad, flydubai, Gulf Air and SriLankan Airlines also suspended services to the country and flight tracking portals showed Singapore Airlines, British Airways and others were forced to reroute flights. Airlines flying over India and Pakistan to Europe, the Middle East and Asia were disrupted and some flights were routed through Mumbai on India's western coast, so they could head further south and avoid Pakistan air space, an Indian government official said. "Civil Aviation Authority of Pakistan has officially closed its airspace until further notice," the Pakistani regulator said in a tweet. Pakistan carried out air strikes and shot down two Indian military jets on Wednesday, Pakistani officials said, a day after Indian warplanes struck inside Pakistan for the first time since a war in 1971, prompting leading powers to urge both of the nuclear-armed countries to show restraint. Mark Martin, founder and chief executive at Martin Consulting India, said about 800 flights a day use the India-Pakistan air corridor, making it "very critical". International airlines that normally transit between Indian and Pakistani airspace have been forced to reroute, including flights by Singapore Airlines, Finnair, British Airways, Aeroflot, and Air India, according to online portal flightradar24.com which tracks the movement of planes globally. Bahrain's Gulf Air said it had suspended all fights to and from Pakistan due to closure of airspace while low-cost carrier flydubai said it is reviewing its schedule. Emirates and Etihad also said they had suspended some flights to Pakistan. India, earlier on Wednesday, shut several airports in the northern part of the country temporarily. Operations at the Indian airports have now resumed. Indian airlines including IndiGo, India's biggest airline by market share, low-cost rival GoAir and full-service carriers Jet Airways and Vistara, a joint venture between Singapore Airlines and Tata Sons, were forced to cancel services to at least six cities in northern India due to airport closures. Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan called for talks between the neighbors, saying "better sense should prevail". "Can we afford any miscalculation with the kind of weapons that we have and you have?" he asked. A Pakistani military spokesman said that one of the downed Indian planes had fallen in Pakistani-held Kashmir, while the other came down on the Indian side of the heavily militarized de facto border dividing the Himalayan territory. Maj. Gen. Asif Ghafoor told a press conference in Islamabad that one of the captured pilots was in custody and the other was in hospital. Indian foreign ministry spokesman Rajeesh Kumar announced that a Pakistan jet was hit as it took part in an operation "to target military installations on the Indian side". US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke separately with the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan and urged them to avoid "further military activity". Syed Maqsood, the superintendent of a government hospital in Indian side of Kashmir, said all hospitals in the region had been asked to paint a red cross on their roofs. Global stocks traded lower on Wednesday. The pan-European STOXX 600 was down 0.5 percent with most regional indexes in the red, while US stock futures for the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq were both down 0.2 percent ahead of the U.S. market open. — Agencies
