Abstract
Space weather is a recognized source of risk to civil aviation through its effects on communication, navigation, surveillance, and radiation systems. Historically, aviation space weather research has achieved substantial progress in identifying the physical mechanisms and operational vulnerabilities associated with individual subsystems, specific technologies, and sensitive regions, which laid the physical foundation for modern operational standards. Growing evidence suggests that the impacts of space weather may extend beyond individual subsystems and manifest themselves in operational metrics such as flight delays, cancellations, safety risks, and economic losses. This paper summarizes recent key advances over the past decade with a particular emphasis on an emerging transition from traditional subsystem-oriented studies toward quantitative investigations of system-level aviation impacts. We further discuss the development of aviation space weather services and the increasing necessity to translate scientific knowledge into understandable indicators, quantifiable consequences, and actionable decision-support tools.
1 Introduction
The impacts of space weather on technological systems have long been a major topic in space weather and space physics. Extensive studies have demonstrated that adverse space weather conditions can interfere with the normal operation of communication, navigation, aerospace, and power systems (; ). With the introduction of high-frequency (HF) communications and high-altitude jet transport, researchers recognized that these disturbances can compromise flight operations through multiple pathways, including HF radio communications, satellite navigation systems, radiation exposure at flight altitudes, and surveillance infrastructure (; ; ; ; ). As commercial aviation increasingly relies on space-based technologies and operates over remote polar and oceanic regions, understanding and mitigating space weather risks has become a critical component of modern aviation safety and operations.
Historically, aviation space weather research has primarily focused on the impacts of space weather on individual communication, navigation, surveillance, and radiation (CNSR) domains. Here, we use CNSR as a review framework that combines the conventional Communications, Navigation, and Surveillance/Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM) systems that underpin modern civil aviation with radiation exposure, an additional major space-weather-related aviation hazard. These studies established the fundamental mechanisms through which space weather disrupts aviation technologies and motivated the development of operational space weather advisory services under the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). However, most investigations have remained centered on specific technologies, with many studies concentrating on impacts within polar regions, high-latitude areas, or particular flight routes and terminal airspaces, thereby providing only a partial view of the overall consequences for modern air transportation systems.
In recent years, growing evidence has suggested that space weather effects may propagate beyond individual subsystems and become detectable in system-level aviation performance metrics, including flight delays, cancellations, safety risks, and economic losses. While space weather effects are also addressed in a broad range of studies on aviation operations and related disciplines, this paper is not intended to provide an exhaustive survey. Instead, emphasis is placed on representative studies from the past decade that have advanced our understanding of how space weather influences aviation. To this end, we first outline the traditional understanding of localized impacts on aviation subsystems, and then discuss the emerging quantitative recognition of system-level responses. Finally, we address current limitations and discuss future directions toward space-weather-aware aviation systems.
2 Traditional understanding of space weather effects on aviation
Shortly after the dawn of aviation, the scientific and operational communities made substantial progress in recognizing that flight activities are susceptible to the highly dynamic space weather environment. These foundational investigations succeeded in identifying direct physical disturbances to individual technical subsystems, including communication, navigation, surveillance, and radiation. In addition, this pioneering body of work established vital benchmarks by demonstrating how space weather primarily affected specific geographical regions, such as high-latitude polar flight corridors, equatorial ionospheric zones, or local airport terminal areas, which laid the essential groundwork for modern aviation risk management.
2.1 Early recognition of HF communication disruptions from the 1930s
As early as the 1930s, Dellinger () reported that solar-induced ionospheric disturbances could degrade or even completely disrupt HF radio communications. This discovery established one of the earliest recognized pathways through which solar activity could affect aviation operations, particularly along polar and trans-oceanic routes.
The operational significance of HF communication disruptions was highlighted by , who reconstructed the extreme May 1967 space weather event. Their study demonstrated that intense solar radio emissions and ionospheric disturbances severely disrupted long-range communication and radar systems. evaluated the MUF(3000) nowcasting service developed within the PECASUS consortium and demonstrated that real-time ionospheric monitoring can effectively support the management of aviation HF communication risks during disturbed space weather conditions. More recently, quantified the occurrence and duration of ICAO-defined HF communication hazards using several decades of observations. Their results showed that communication degradations associated with shortwave fadeouts, polar-cap absorption, and post-storm frequency depressions can occur frequently during solar-cycle maxima, posing persistent challenges for remote and polar flight operations.
Despite its historical importance, dedicated research on HF communication has shifted its focus from descriptive case studies to long-term statistical hazard assessments under the ICAO framework. This trend likely reflects a major technological transition toward satellite communication systems, which have reduced, though not eliminated, the operational reliance on legacy HF networks. Crucially, emerging low-Earth orbit (LEO) solutions like Starlink introduce new vulnerabilities, such as ionospheric scintillation and storm-induced atmospheric drag (), making this a highly promising avenue for future research.
2.2 Growing recognition of radiation exposure at flight altitudes from the 1960s
With the rapid expansion of high-altitude jet transportation in the 1960s, increasing attention was directed toward the potential biological and operational risks associated with radiation exposure (). It became evident that galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) and solar energetic particles (SEPs) could significantly increase radiation doses at aviation altitudes, particularly along high-latitude routes where geomagnetic shielding is weak.
introduced the AVIDOS 2.0 nowcasting service within the ESA Space Weather Portal, demonstrating real-time estimation of radiation exposure along flight trajectories during solar particle events. further emphasized the importance of dedicated measurement campaigns, such as RaD-X, in improving the observational basis for aviation radiation forecasting and model validation.
A major focus of research has been the development and verification of radiation assessment models. conducted systematic evaluations of leading aviation dosimetry models, including CARI-7A, PANDOCA, and NAIRAS, showing generally good agreement with available observations under quiet conditions. Subsequently, provided a comprehensive review of atmospheric radiation hazards in aviation, covering GCRs, SEP events, and their implications for both crew health and avionics reliability.
Several studies have extended these efforts to extreme-event scenarios. examined the potential impacts of the historical extreme SEP events on modern air traffic, demonstrating that radiation exposure on polar routes could far exceed current operational limits. Similarly, revisited the 2003 Halloween storms, achieving close agreement with onboard measurements and providing important validation for next-generation radiation forecasting systems. evaluated the ICAO radiation advisory framework using the January 2005 SEP events and highlighted limitations of geographically fixed warning regions, supporting the development of more adaptive operational advisory systems.
Beyond hazard assessment, demonstrated that altitude reductions can substantially reduce radiation exposure while remaining economically preferable to flight cancellations. extended this concept through a probabilistic risk framework that quantified both radiation risks and mitigation costs associated with severe SEP events. Building on these efforts, developed a trajectory optimization approach that balances safety and economic constraints during extreme space weather conditions.
In addition, increasing attention has been directed toward the susceptibility of modern avionics to high-energy particles. For example, the 2025 Airbus A320-family flight-control anomaly, addressed by , renewed concerns regarding radiation-induced single-event upsets in flight-critical electronics, although dedicated peer-reviewed studies are still emerging. Overall, compared with other aviation space weather impacts, radiation hazards are now the most mature and quantitatively characterized component of aviation space weather risk.
2.3 Navigation vulnerabilities associated with ionospheric disturbances from the 1990s
While early flight operations relied on magnetic compasses that were vulnerable to severe deviations during geomagnetic storms, the operationalization of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) in the 1990s revolutionized navigation efficiency. However, this technological leap simultaneously exposed modern air transport networks to a complex set of localized ionospheric vulnerabilities ().
investigated the ionospheric response to the X9.3 solar flare and demonstrated that sudden ionospheric disturbances can degrade GNSS positioning performance and reduce the availability of satellite-based augmentation systems such as EGNOS. Focusing on low-latitude environments, examined the impacts of equatorial ionospheric scintillation on aviation GNSS operations. The authors showed that strong scintillation events increase signal loss-of-lock occurrences and degrade receiver tracking performance. More recently, large-scale Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) datasets have enabled direct assessments of navigation performance under disturbed conditions. analyzed a massive database of commercial flights to identify systemic GPS gaps and deviations, establishing an empirical baseline to distinguish anthropogenic electromagnetic interference from space-weather-driven navigation degradation. demonstrated that space weather can significantly degrade airborne GNSS positioning accuracy, particularly for aircraft relying on satellite-based augmentation systems. All these studies demonstrate that despite the advanced redundancy of modern avionics, satellite-guided aviation remains vulnerable to space weather disturbances.
2.4 Localized surveillance vulnerabilities from the CNS/ATM era
While solar radio interference with radar systems has been recognized since the 1940s (), surveillance-related space weather risks have received comparatively limited attention within aviation research. Following the adoption of the CNS/ATM framework in the 1990s, studies expanded from traditional radar systems to satellite-based surveillance technologies.
demonstrated that an intense solar radio burst could generate emissions far exceeding operational interference thresholds, resulting in disruptions to European secondary surveillance radars and anomalies in Instrument Landing System (ILS) operations. More recently, reported ADS-B tracking anomalies during a X-class solar flare, including temporary message losses and positioning deviations associated with rapid ionospheric disturbances, highlighting the potential for degradation of surveillance capabilities. Extending this work, analyzed more than 700 million ADS-B messages during the May 2024 Mother’s Day superstorm and identified statistically significant increases in tracking anomalies across European airspace. Overall, such literature suggests that space weather can affect both ground-based and satellite-based surveillance systems, implying that surveillance degradation may have broader operational consequences that deserve further investigation.
3 Emerging quantitative understanding of system-level aviation impacts
While the above studies established the physical pathways through which space weather can affect aviation, most of these investigations focused on subsystems, specific technologies, or confined regions. For airline operators, air traffic management authorities, and the traveling public, the primary concern is often not the degradation of a particular subsystem or a polar region, but the broader consequences that follow. What matters most could be the quantitative evaluations regarding systematic increases in flight delays and cancellations, potentially elevated incident rates, subsequent economic losses, and related operational responses.
3.1 Space weather impacts on flight delays and flight times
Flight delays, emerging from the collective response of the aviation network, represent a primary operational metric through which space weather disturbances can be examined at the system level (). Moreover, any potential space weather effect is typically smaller than the variability introduced by routine operational and meteorological factors. Reliable detection consequently requires multi-year datasets spanning multiple airports and large numbers of flights, allowing researchers to statistically separate space-weather-related effects from confounding influences such as weather conditions, traffic demand, regulatory changes, and intrinsic temporal cycles, including daily, weekly, and seasonal variations. Consequently, isolating the effects of space weather on flight delays presents a significant scientific challenge.
provided the first quantitative large-scale investigation linking space weather to systematic flight delays using approximately four million flight records from five major Chinese hub airports. Their results showed that the average flight delay time increased by 7.41 min during space weather events. Moreover, their analysis spanning 22 years revealed a long-term negative correlation between the national flight regularity rate and the total sunspot number, suggesting that space weather may systemically influence aviation performance at a nationwide scale. Focusing on solar flares, identified a distinct temporal modulation and latitudinal dependence of solar-flare-induced departure delays, with stronger effects observed near the subsolar point region. Extending the analysis beyond delays, demonstrated that the rise in flight cancellations during space weather events correlates monotonically with magnetospheric-ionospheric disturbances. After controlling for confounding effects, they characterized the temporal response of flight cancellation rates following independent space weather events. Beyond CNSR impacts, proposed a new atmosphere-mediated pathway through which solar proton events (SPEs) may influence flight times. Their study suggested that SPE-induced atmospheric circulation changes can perturb the polar jet stream near cruise altitudes, leading to measurable variations in flight durations. Collectively, these investigations have opened a new research direction beyond traditional CNSR impacts, focusing on the quantification of system-level responses on flight delays and flight times.
3.2 Quantifying the safety and economic consequences
Quantifying the potential flight accidents and economic losses driven by space weather remains an important but challenging objective. However, the rarity of major aviation accidents imposes inherent small-sample limitations on statistical analyses, while differences in aircraft types, operational environments, and airline practices further complicate attribution. Economic assessments also face additional challenges because cost structures vary substantially among airlines and regions, making direct comparisons and validation of loss estimates difficult.
reviewed evidence linking geomagnetic disturbances and radiation exposure to neurophysiological changes in flight crews, suggesting potential impacts on fatigue, cognitive performance, and situational awareness. conducted a century-scale statistical analysis of more than 7,000 fatal civil aviation accidents and reported a significant association between accident occurrence and geomagnetic storm activity. Focusing specifically on turbulence-related accidents, further identified a tendency for fatal turbulence events to occur following geomagnetic disturbances, proposing that space-weather-driven atmospheric variability may contribute to aviation safety risks.
The economic consequences of space weather have also received increasing attention. highlighted that, although major carriers actively monitor space weather risks affecting high-latitude operations, rigorous quantitative assessments of aviation-related economic losses remain limited. demonstrated that mitigating extreme radiation exposure through altitude restrictions or rerouting can substantially increase fuel consumption and flight duration. Subsequently, quantified the economic impacts of GNSS degradation at Hong Kong International Airport and showed that the time cost of flight delays to passengers can be between 1.7 and 3.0 million Euros. Using modern flight networks, estimated that a Halloween-class storm event could generate aviation losses approaching 50 million Euros in the United States, while a complementary network-scale study over the Greater Bay Area demonstrated that prolonged GNSS outages could result in economic costs of a similar order of magnitude (). Most recently, provided observational evidence from the May 2024 geomagnetic storm, showing that operational rerouting of transatlantic flights increased fuel consumption, flight times, and overall operating costs by an average of USD 8,582 per flight.
Although the underlying physical mechanisms linking space weather to flight accidents remain incompletely understood, and economic estimates are subject to substantial regional and operational uncertainties, the existing evidence tends to suggest that space weather may represent a potential contributing factor to aviation safety and impose non-negligible economic burdens on the aviation sector. These findings underscore the importance and practical value of developing rigorous quantitative frameworks capable of translating space weather disturbances into measurable safety, and economic consequences.
3.3 Toward quantifiable and actionable aviation space weather services
Despite growing evidence that space weather can influence aviation operations at the system level, awareness and operational preparedness within the aviation community remain limited. This limitation is partly driven by the substantial disciplinary gap between solar-terrestrial physics and commercial flight operations, as well as the relative scarcity of interdisciplinary expertise capable of bridging both domains.
On the operational side, described the automated architecture of the ICAO-designated space weather center operated by the Fedorov Institute of Applied Geophysics, illustrating how radiation, ionospheric, and communication-related products can be transformed into standardized aviation advisories for international air navigation. described how ionospheric products have been incorporated into ICAO-compliant advisory services to support operational awareness of navigation-related space weather hazards. Similarly, summarized early operational experiences from the ICAO-designated PECASUS consortium and emphasized the importance of user training, education, and continuous feedback from airlines. Together, these studies reveal that the fundamental infrastructure for aviation space weather services has been established, at least within the current ICAO framework.
However, the existence of operational products does not necessarily imply effective operational utilization. Most recently, surveyed pilots, flight operators, and crew-resource-management trainers to evaluate the operational relevance of current aviation space weather products. The study revealed that knowledge of specific operational impacts and mitigation procedures remains limited. Respondents also emphasized that many existing products provide scientific information rather than clear operational guidance. Consistently, highlighted that aviation space weather research should move beyond traditional hazard identification and establish stronger links with operational decision-making, advocating the integration of quantifiable space weather information into air traffic management frameworks. Complementing these quantitative studies, a recent commentary () further highlights these challenges, seeking to popularize space weather knowledge and improve general operational awareness.
4 Conclusion
In summary, traditional aviation space weather studies have made significant advancements in identifying the localized impacts of solar and geomagnetic disturbances on individual CNSR subsystems. These efforts successfully established the fundamental physical pathways through which space weather affects aviation and laid the foundation for the implementation of ICAO-compliant operational services. More recent studies suggest that the consequences of space weather extend beyond isolated technical disruptions and become detectable in operational metrics such as flight delays, cancellations, safety risks, and economic losses.
Despite these advances, many underlying mechanisms and quantitative relationships remain incompletely understood and require validation across different regions, airline operating environments, and phases of the solar cycle. More importantly, aviation space weather research appears to be entering a new phase in which the central challenge is no longer merely the identification of physical hazards, but the translation of scientific knowledge into understandable indicators, quantifiable consequences, and actionable decision-support capabilities for the aviation sector. The rapid development of low-altitude aviation and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) also introduces emerging research challenges for investigating the potential impacts of space weather on aviation systems (). Future efforts should place greater emphasis on interdisciplinary studies integrating space physics, atmospheric science, aviation operations, and air traffic management. Combining physics-based models with large-scale operational datasets and decision-support frameworks will be essential for improving risk assessment, enhancing operational resilience, and facilitating more efficient air traffic management.
Statements
Author contributions
XL: Writing – review and editing, Writing – original draft. YW: Writing – original draft, Investigation, Visualization, Formal Analysis, Software, Resources, Funding acquisition, Validation, Supervision, Project administration, Methodology, Writing – review and editing, Data curation, Conceptualization. FW: Writing – review and editing, Writing – original draft. XF: Writing – review and editing, Writing – original draft. BW: Writing – original draft, Writing – review and editing. PZ: Writing – review and editing, Writing – original draft. XX: Writing – review and editing, Writing – original draft. ZZ: Writing – review and editing, Writing – original draft.
Funding
The author(s) declared that financial support was received for this work and/or its publication. This work is jointly supported by the National Key R & D Program of China (Grant No. 2022YFF0503900), the National Natural Science Foundation of China 42030204 and 42174199, the Specialized Research Fund for State Key Laboratory of Solar Activity and Space Weather, Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation 2023B1515040021, Science and Technology Program of Guangdong Province (grant No. 2025B1212050001), Shenzhen Technology Project (GXWD20220817152453003 and RCJC20210609104422048), Shenzhen Key Laboratory Launching Project (No. ZDSYS20210702140800001), and the Open Research Fund of the Key Laboratory of Smart Travel for Civil Aviation Passengers, Civil Aviation Administration of China (Grant No. ZHCX-2026003).
Conflict of interest
The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
The reviewer DX declared a past co-authorship with the author XF to the handling editor.
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Summary
Keywords
air traffic management, aviation, flight delays, operational impacts, space weather
Citation
Lin XL, Wang Y, Wei FS, Feng XS, Wang BY, Zuo PB, Xu XJ and Zhou ZL (2026) A review of recent advances in space weather effects on aviation. Front. Astron. Space Sci. 13:1937364. doi: 10.3389/fspas.2026.1937364
Received
14 July 2026
Revised
31 July 2026
Accepted
04 August 2026
Published
18 August 2026
Volume
13 - 2026
Edited by
Katya Georgieva, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), Bulgaria
Reviewed by
Dabin Xue, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China
Updates
Copyright
© 2026 Lin, Wang, Wei, Feng, Wang, Zuo, Xu and Zhou.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Y. Wang, wingwy@mail.ustc.edu.cn, wy@hit.edu.cn
Disclaimer
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.