The pressure on EU is certainly on now that India joins China's lead. India even went so far to warn that it would retaliate if its carriers are barred from EU's air space. In the mean time, Russia may also join the move. It's pretty certain that the tax cannot be enforced if China, India and Russia all refused to pay. The most powerful tool for EU to force the airlines to pay the tax is to ban them from flying thru/to EU, but if Russia, China and India respond in kind and ban EU carriers from flying thru their airspace, the effect to EU airlines will be devastating. To fly from Europe to anywhere in East Asia (Japan, Korea, ASEAN, Australia), they have to fly over at least one of the three countries. The only way to work around that is to fly over Alaska (like back in the 1960s) or to deviate southward all the way to the Indian Ocean to avoid the sub-continent.
For example, a southern deviation to avoid India would add 1000km (about 2hrs) to LHR-SIN and an Alaskan deviation to avoid Russia would add 3000km (about 5hrs) to LHR-NRT. 777-200LR would be in great demand if it comes down to this.
Moreover, the article states that Indonesia is contemplating a response as well. The inability to fly over Indonesian airspace would effectively cut BA off from Australia (except for the code sharing flights with QF). Any deviation from SIN to Australia would require an uneconomical routing to fly all the way around Samatra Island over Indian Ocean.
The more interesting twist is that India and Indonesia do not have much to lose by defying EU. They probably have even more chips to play in this game than China, as EU is China's largest trading partner and Chinese economy relies heavily on exports. For India and Indonesia, Air India is not able to compete with the European and the Gulf carriers on flights to EU or North America anyway. Garuda only has 3 weekly flights into EU air space. The economy of both countries do not heavily rely on EU while EU is trying to borrow money from anyone who can provide. In the article, India pointed out explicitly that "We have the power of the economy; we are not bleeding as they are", which means India may be willing to retaliate outside of the aviation scope. As for Russia, we all know that Putin freely use its supply of natural gas to EU as bargaining chip any time, and it doesn't really need anything from EU. If EU doesn't want the natural gas, China, Korea and Japan will gladly buy them up from Russia.
It would be interesting to see if Brazil also takes action. It definitely has the power to cripple TAP and Iberia, and impact any EU carriers operation into the Andes region and Argentina.
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