Overflight and landing permits: the invisible work behind a charter trip

You see "São Paulo to Riyadh" (plot it →) on the itinerary. Behind it, someone at the operator spent days obtaining written permission from six countries to fly through their airspace. The flight is the visible part. The permits are the rest.

The Chicago Convention, in one paragraph

The 1944 Chicago Convention established the modern legal framework for international civil aviation. The headline principle: each country has full sovereignty over the airspace above its territory. No aircraft may enter that airspace without permission. International airlines operate under bilateral agreements that grant standing permission for scheduled service. Everyone else — including the business aviation world — generally needs to ask for permission on a flight-by-flight basis.

That's the legal source of "overflight permits" and "landing permits". They're the operational implementation of the Chicago Convention's sovereignty principle. A handful of countries make this easy and largely waive the requirement; most don't.

Two kinds of permits

Overflight permit — permission to transit the airspace of a country without landing. Required even if the aircraft never gets near the ground in that country. Issued by the civil aviation authority, sometimes via the foreign ministry. Free or modestly priced in most countries.

Landing permit — permission to land at an airport in that country. Required in addition to the overflight permit if you actually intend to touch down. Issued by the civil aviation authority, often with input from customs, immigration, and the operator of the specific airport. Almost always involves fees, sometimes substantial ones.

For a single international trip with two stops, you may need overflight permits for half a dozen countries and landing permits for two more. The dispatch package for a multi-day, multi-country trip can easily run twenty pages of permit confirmations alone.

Who needs permits, and who doesn't

The picture is uneven across the world.

Generally easy (no permit needed for short-notice GA):

• United States — Part 91 international arrivals just need APIS and a Customs notification (eAPIS, ~30 minutes).
• European Union and EFTA (Schengen) — internal movement requires no permits; ad-hoc permits for non-EU operators entering Schengen are usually fast.
• United Kingdom — straightforward for most flights.
• Canada — minimal requirements.
• Australia, New Zealand — modest paperwork but fast.

Permit required but routine (24–72 hour lead time):

• Brazil — formal request via ANAC, generally 48-hour notice.
• Mexico — short-notice possible via handler.
• Most Caribbean countries.
• South Africa, Egypt, Morocco — moderate paperwork.
• UAE (including Dubai and Abu Dhabi) — efficient process.
• Singapore, Hong Kong — well-organized civil aviation authorities.

Significant lead time and process (5–10 working days or more):

• Russia — extensive paperwork, very strict adherence to filed routing.
• China — formal MOFCOM process, can take 2+ weeks.
• India — multi-step process involving DGCA and AAI.
• Many African countries — variable; some quick, some slow.
• Saudi Arabia — formal process, especially for landings at non-major airports.
• Iran (where political situation allows) — extensive review.

Complex or sometimes impossible:

• North Korea — for the rare flight that needs it, expect months of advance work.
• Active conflict zones — Yemen, parts of Syria, eastern Ukraine, parts of Sudan. Permits may not be obtainable at all; routes are typically rerouted around the entire area.

The information they want

A standard permit application includes (depending on the country, in some combination):

• Aircraft registration, type, MTOW
• Operator name, address, contact
• Crew names, nationalities, license numbers
• Passenger names, nationalities, passport numbers (sometimes — and sometimes only "number of passengers")
• Full routing including specific waypoints and flight levels
• Date and time of entry into / exit from the country's FIR
• Purpose of flight (Charter? Owner-operated? Commercial?)
• For landings: handling agent at the destination airport, fuel supplier, accommodation for crew

The information is often duplicated across multiple forms because there's no global standard. A single trip can require the same set of crew passports to be uploaded to half a dozen different countries' systems.

Typical lead times

For a "normal" international business jet trip — say, São Paulo to Geneva direct — the permit work looks like this:

• T-7 days: Trip confirmed. Operator opens permit files for each FIR on the planned route. For SBGR–LSGG via the standard great circle: Brazil exit (formality), Cape Verde FIR, Senegal, Mauritania, Morocco, Spain, France, Switzerland landing.
• T-5 days: Permit requests submitted. Cape Verde FIR is essentially instant. Spain and France respond within 24 hours. Morocco and Switzerland typically respond within 48 hours.
• T-3 days: Final passenger manifest finalized. Permits updated with passenger details where required.
• T-1 day: All permits confirmed and consolidated into the trip package. ATC flight plan filed.
• Day of flight: Crew receives the trip package. Any in-flight rerouting requires checking against permitted countries.

For more complex trips — multi-country tours, destinations in regions with more bureaucratic processes — the lead time extends to weeks. A 10-stop, 3-week corporate trip across Asia can easily require 30+ permits, with the first ones being requested before the trip is even fully scheduled.

What happens when a permit falls through

Permits get denied or delayed for a variety of reasons. Most are mundane — a missing piece of paperwork, an outdated insurance certificate, a fee that wasn't paid. Some are political — sanctions, ongoing diplomatic disputes, or last-minute restrictions tied to events on the ground.

When a permit doesn't come through, the operations team has limited options:

• Reroute around the country. This is the most common solution. If the great circle route runs through a country whose permit didn't materialize, the dispatch reroutes to a longer path. Sometimes that means 100 extra nautical miles; sometimes 1,000.
• Delay the trip. If the permit might come through with another day's notice, sometimes the trip slips 24 hours.
• Cancel. Rare, but it happens for trips where there's no viable alternative routing.

The reroute option is why an experienced dispatch desk thinks of route planning as a multi-variable optimization, not a fixed great-circle calculation. The "best route" is one that's both physically efficient and politically passable on the day.

The cost side

Overflight fees range from free (most of Europe, Brazil, etc.) to roughly $1–$3 per nautical mile in a few jurisdictions. Landing fees for business aviation can range from a few hundred dollars at most secondary airports to several thousand at major hubs in slot-restricted markets.

For a single long-haul international trip with two countries' landings and four countries' overflights, total government and airport fees typically run between $5,000 and $25,000 — separate from fuel, handling, and crew costs. It's a meaningful line item, but rarely the deciding factor in trip economics.

Why operators specialize in this

You can in theory request permits yourself for a single flight. Most owners and small operators don't, for three reasons:

It's relationship work. The civil aviation authority of a given country is more responsive to operators they know than to one-off requesters. An operator doing 100 permits a year with a given country builds a working relationship that gets things done faster.

Mistakes are expensive. A wrongly-filed permit can leave the aircraft sitting at the previous airport while the trip principal misses a meeting. The cost of one missed trip exceeds years of paying an operator to handle permits.

The expertise compounds. Knowing that Mongolia requires hard-copy crew licenses rather than scans, or that Egypt's online permit system goes down every other Friday for maintenance, only comes from doing it weekly. Generalists don't have that institutional memory.

How Flight Mapper helps with the geometry side

Flight Mapper isn't a permits system — there's no permit data inside it. What it does help with is the geographic visualization that informs the permit conversation.

Plot your planned route, then drop a few range rings to show which countries the great circle path crosses. You can immediately see which FIRs are affected. From there, an experienced permits desk can tell you which countries are easy, which need lead time, and whether any are problematic on the day of the trip.

For more complex multi-country routes, plot all candidate routings simultaneously — for example, "northern Europe path" versus "Mediterranean path" — and compare which transits politically easier countries even if the geography is slightly longer.

The takeaway

The great circle drawn on Flight Mapper is the physics of the trip. The permits are the politics. The two have to align for the trip to happen — and an experienced operator's value is largely in making sure they do.

If you're planning an international business jet trip and want a hand with the permits side, that's one of the core services Alexa Business Aviation Management provides. Get in touch — we'd be happy to walk you through what your route would involve.

More reading: São Paulo to Geneva trip anatomy · ETOPS explained · Back to blog