Quick Answer: Major airlines including Air France-KLM and EasyJet are drawing up contingency plans for jet fuel shortages as the Iran conflict strips supply certainty from the global aviation fuel chain. Fuel suppliers are declining to guarantee availability beyond three to four weeks, routes to Asia are under active review, and IATA warns that European jet fuel security rests on just over one month of commercial inventory.
Airlines Face Jet Fuel Shortage as Iran War Disrupts Global Supply
The Iran war has reached the operations centres of the world’s major airlines — and the problem is no longer just the price of fuel. It is whether they can get it at all.
Three weeks into the conflict, the aviation industry has absorbed the closure of Gulf airspace, the grounding of Emirates and Qatar Airways at the height of the disruption, and a jet fuel price that has surged from $85–90 per barrel before the first strikes to between $150 and $200 per barrel now. What it is confronting this week is a new and more fundamental threat — the possibility that physical supply, not just price, becomes the binding constraint on operations.
Suppliers Are No Longer Giving Forward Guidance
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SubscribeEasyJet chief executive Kenton Jarvis put the situation plainly. Fuel suppliers have confirmed availability for the next three weeks. Beyond that, they will not commit. Nobody, he said, is prepared to say there are no supply issues in six weeks’ time — because they cannot say it with confidence.
That is an extraordinary position for a commercial fuel supplier to take. Forward supply assurance is the foundation of airline fuel procurement. When suppliers stop offering it, the operational implications are immediate. Air France-KLM chief executive Ben Smith confirmed his group is drawing up scenarios for how it would function under shortage conditions — including cutting services to parts of Asia where the ability to refuel for the return journey to Europe can no longer be guaranteed.
Why European Reserves Don’t Solve the Problem
The structural challenge is one of geography. According to IATA, jet fuel security in Europe rests on commercial inventories of just over one month of demand. Potential alternative suppliers including India and China face their own constraints — 84% of crude passing through the Strait of Hormuz is destined for Asian markets, limiting global availability of the crude needed for jet fuel refining.
Healthy home reserves also don’t solve the refuelling problem at destination airports. Long-haul aircraft cannot carry sufficient fuel for return journeys — the weight penalty is prohibitive. An airline with full tanks at Amsterdam cannot use that fuel to fly back from Bangkok. If Bangkok’s supply is disrupted, the route is compromised regardless of what is sitting in European storage.
This is why the strikes on Ras Laffan and the targeting of Saudi Aramco’s SAMREF refinery matter so directly to aviation. The Middle East had been sending approximately 470,000 barrels of jet fuel per day through the Strait of Hormuz to airports across Europe and Asia before the conflict began. That flow has been severely curtailed. Kuwait, a major jet fuel exporter to northwest Europe, has already been forced to cut output.
The Cost Pressure Is Landing Simultaneously
Airlines are absorbing supply uncertainty on top of a cost environment that has already deteriorated sharply. With stocks and bonds falling together as markets price a protracted energy shock, the financial pressure is coming from multiple directions at once. Airlines with hedging programmes have near-term protection — but SAS, which had no fuel consumption hedged for the following twelve months, is among those most exposed. Finnair, which hedged over 80% of its first-quarter purchases, now worries the hedged fuel may simply not be available if the conflict continues.
Deutsche Bank analysts warned that absent near-term relief, airlines could be forced to ground thousands of aircraft, with the industry’s weakest carriers potentially halting operations entirely. The conflict that has already restructured global shipping routes and driven oil toward $116 is now forcing aviation to confront a scenario its financial models were not built for — not a fuel price shock, but a fuel availability crisis.
The contingency plans being drawn up this week are the industry’s formal acknowledgement that the optimistic scenario is gone. The war that began with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities has now reached the turnaround schedules of commercial aircraft across the world.
