#111 Libby Bahat, Israel Civil Aviation Authority: Flying civilians into a war zone

In this episode of The Vertical Space, Libby Bahat — Head of the Aerial Infrastructure Department at the Israel Civil Aviation Authority — returns to discuss one of the most consequential and least understood challenges in modern aviation: how to keep commercial air service running during active armed conflict.

Libby explains how Israel's civil aviation authority has built a quantitative framework for assessing missile threat risk, coordinating in real time with military and intelligence organizations, evaluating airline decision-making, and balancing safety with the national imperative to keep Ben Gurion Airport open. This is a rare look at how a serious regulator reasons when the only data point that would prove him wrong is the one he has organized his entire career to never see.

Key Topics

• How Israel quantifies missile threat risk to civil aviation using debris models, interception zones, and penetration probabilities
• Why the decision to fly into a conflict zone involves more than ten separate stakeholders — insurers, lessors, unions, and multiple regulators
• How civil-military coordination at Ben Gurion Airport works in real time during active conflict
• What the worst-case scenario looks like operationally and how the airport responds in those minutes
• Why some airlines returned to Israel and others did not — and what that reveals about risk appetite vs. commercial pressure
• The risk of misidentification and friendly fire — and what structurally prevents it in Israeli airspace
• Lessons for Central European regulators as conflict-zone effects expand beyond Ukraine

+ Read Full Transcript

Libby Bahat 0:00
My normal job at the Civil Aviation Authority is a procedure designer, so I am involved in the process of designing a new instrument landing approach to a runway, and the math is very clear. If you have a mountain this high, this far away from the runway, it's a very clear math. And the same with engineering. This is the things that made civil aviation amazing and almost bulletproof and almost 100% safe. Unfortunately, in the conflict zone area, this is not the situation.

Jim Barry 0:43
Hey everyone. Welcome back to The Vertical Space and a conversation with Libby Bahat. Libby is the head of Aerial Infrastructure Department at the Israeli Civil Aviation Authority. Libby shares how Israel's civil aviation system manages the extraordinary challenge of keeping commercial air traffic moving during wartime through real-time coordination, risk modeling, and close civil-military collaboration. He's been there for 17 years. He's a qualified lawyer and licensed private pilot. Within the authority, Libby has three main areas of responsibility: leading the regulatory implementation of UTM in Israel, airspace infrastructure including airspace design and instrument flight procedures, and civil-military cooperation both in peacetime and during armed conflict. In this role, he's responsible for assessing risks arising from civil aviation operations in conflict-affected airspace over Israel, developing mitigating measures where possible, and when necessary, supporting decisions to restrict or close airspace to civil aviation for safety reasons. Libby Bahat, welcome to The Vertical Space yet again.

Libby Bahat 2:12
Thank you so much. Very, really honored to be here again.

Jim Barry 2:19
Tell us, what is something about flying into conflict zones that very few in aviation agree with you on?

Libby Bahat 2:27
The definition of civilians flying into conflict zones is something that's kind of hard to accept, and people might argue that's simply not a place for civil aviation. And unfortunately, not only Israel has this dilemma — it's not only third world countries and distinct areas in Africa or Ukraine. We're starting to see this in Central Europe. We're starting to see elements from the conflict entering Romania, Poland, Estonia, and Latvia. So the argument that civil aviation should not exist in conflict zones was a pretty decent argument to make, and that changed. More and more people now understand that it's a complicated answer, and there's no simple black and white.

Flying into a conflict area

Luka 3:36
Is my understanding of your actual position correct when I summarize it as: the risk for civil aviation to fly into a conflict area can indeed be made small enough, quantified honestly enough, minimized, managed to the point where it becomes a defensible safety judgment and not commercial pressure?

Libby Bahat 4:06
To a certain extent. I wish things were simple. I wish I had a criteria, like an engineer, with very specific numbers and very specific ways to calculate them. My normal job at the Civil Aviation Authority is a procedure designer — the math is very clear. Unfortunately, in the conflict zone area, this is not the situation. I don't have a very specific number and criteria. The way you can quantify it is very challenging. Eventually, we have to use qualitative judgment and professionals working with a lot of groups to verify what we are doing is reasonable.

Very quickly: we check what is the risk for a certain day. How many missiles are we expecting? What is the length of the event? What is the risk of a certain flight to be in that timeframe? What are the success rates of interception? And then we start to see some numbers. How many debris are there from an interception? What are their size? What does it take to penetrate an envelope of an aircraft? So we do have some numbers we can use, but it's a combination of both math and numbers, and professional qualitative assessments.

Luka 7:46
Unlike developing a procedure where everything is known upfront and it can be highly accurate, precise, and safe — this is a different beast. But despite that, when I looked at the materials, they still were surprisingly quantitative, as opposed to just falling back on insurers to make that assessment. That was one thing that stood out to me.

Libby Bahat 7:46
You mentioned insurers, and it's something that people don't realize — how many are involved in the decision to send flights to a certain destination. It's not just the airline CEO. We're looking at unions, regulators of the destination country, regulators of the origin, the regulator of that specific operator, insurers, engine owners, aircraft lessors. We calculated more than 10 parties involved in making the decision to fly somewhere. Not to mention, eventually it's a business. Airlines have to make money. Funny thing about insurers — they work only with numbers. Assuming we have a 99% success rate of intercepting missiles, when a missile penetrates, they say, "Yeah, this was calculated with the numbers. This was predictable." Unlike the general public and pilots who see something happened and react — the insurance guy will say, "No, nothing wrong. We knew this all along."

Lessons from the past that inform wartime decision-making

Jim Barry 10:09
Before we get into the details of what you're doing in a dynamic wartime situation, what decades of experience do you bring to this in a non-military conflict that you had to deal with day-to-day in the past? How did you apply that experience to your dynamic wartime decision-making?

Libby Bahat 10:42
Unfortunately, Israel has been at different stages of conflict and war since the day it was established. The basic structure since 1948 — a very small country, a huge air force, 90% of the airspace controlled by the air force. Due to different reasons, some of them budgets, the civilian units are sitting in some cases inside the military, the air force unit. So the basic structure of Israel's civil and military coordination is combined — it might be one of the strongest connections in the world.

Throughout the years, we built SIDs and STARs just for the event of a conflict. Runways that are not supposed to be used for takeoffs or landings, we have approaches and departures from them just in case. We do multiple exercises a year. Very unfortunately, in the last 10 years, we have a big conflict every two years that affected Ben Gurion. So our controllers are extremely experienced. Redundancies have been built from day one.

What is the intent of modeling wartime risk to airlines

Luka 13:50
What really is the intent of this risk modeling? Is this an exercise to truly try to understand and quantify the risk and use that as a basis for decision-making support? Or is a more cynical view that we're doing this to have something to fall back on and avoid accusations of negligence in the event of a loss?

Libby Bahat 14:24
I try to do the best thing for Israel. Israel is very different from many countries — it's kind of like an island state. We have minimal relationships with our neighbors and don't have a train service to Europe. Israel's economy, Israel's connection to the world, relies on civil aviation. So we try to balance that need. It's not money, it's not answering to ministers who want Ben Gurion open because the enemy wants Ben Gurion closed and Israel disconnected from the world. But we did close Ben Gurion in every conflict with Iran for many hours, for full nights, and this conflict, for a full week — no one entering or leaving. We understand the responsibility.

I think if we got it wrong, we would have known. I feel we're doing a decent job and keeping safety at a very high level.

Data and uncertainty

Luka 16:38
In your model, when you quantify the risk of interception debris, interception zones, missile penetrations — you assign about 1 to 2% probability of a missile penetrating the defensive layer. Where does that number actually come from? How wide are the error bars?

Libby Bahat 17:02
God is in the little details. The general assumption in the public and media is that Israel has around 95–99% success rate of interception. But you could ask this question in so many ways. Are we talking about Protective Edge? Epic Fury? What timeframe? What is a success and what is a failure? If a missile is not being intercepted because there's an aircraft on final — it happened in November 2023 — the Air Force is not allowed to intercept ballistic missiles if there's any chance it will affect civilian traffic. Is that a failure?

However, all of these numbers are not relevant to civil aviation. We're not talking about 95% or 99%. We're talking about 10 to the minus 9, 10 to the minus 7 or 8 — we're starting to talk about one in a billion. So whether it's 95% or 80%, it doesn't matter. In the CAA, at every missile launch we act as if it will fail, because 90% is simply not good enough for civilian flight.

Strategic considerations

Jim Barry 25:56
How much do you already know well in advance by company, by country, by different variables that go into this decision as to how to treat different types of aircraft given their origin? And how much of your decision-making is tactical?

Libby Bahat 26:51
The scene around Israel hasn't changed a lot. No one was surprised when the conflict with Iran started. So strategically, we knew where we were going. We had time to prepare and exercise, and we did that a lot on different scenarios.

We know how long a flight of a ballistic missile from Iran to Israel takes — 2,000 kilometers, speeds don't vary much, we know we have 12 minutes. And now we can assess: we have a barrage of three missiles, multiple aircraft in the TMA on the ground, and so on.

If you open our en route routes map from 15 years ago it's very different from today. When we had the conflict with Hezbollah we used routes north of Ben Gurion. We could use routes that went south of Ben Gurion, not the usual routes. An aircraft flying to Israel once a year just gets assigned to a different route to enter Ben Gurion without necessarily knowing anything is different.

Diving into the risk model

Luka 34:23
One thing I kept getting stuck on when looking at the risk model is that it really collapses to a single recommendation: if you want to minimize the risk, minimize the time on the ground where you have passengers and fuel on the aircraft. The discomfort I have is that it is also the one variable you can actually control as the authority. Is this the nail you've found for your hammer?

Libby Bahat 35:35
I do have other factors I can control. When the defense on Ben Gurion is taking shape, we work together with the military to make the defense optimized. I can also control the numbers of passengers on board, the number of aircraft on the ground. At certain stages of the conflict, we allowed only two or three aircraft on the ground at any one time.

But it's not the only factor. We also have models that look at risk on the air. Ground time is an additional factor, not the only one, and we control it pretty well. But absolutely not the only one.

Worst case scenario

Luka 40:35
What's the worst case scenario here? If aircraft is on the ground, passengers are aboard, there's a launch that occurs, an interception happens directly overhead, debris falls on the airport — what does the airport actually do in those minutes?

Libby Bahat 40:59
We divided the situation into very specific stages of the flight. Is it safe for a controller to tell an aircraft on minimums — 200 feet above ground — to go around? Maybe it's more dangerous, maybe better to let it land. We have very good and detailed procedures for what to do in every situation, exercised many times in drills and unfortunately in reality.

Very generally: if the aircraft is connected to the air bridge and we have very few passengers, the safest course of action is to have everyone go to the shelters. We have pretty decent alert time — it gives you a couple of possibilities. When we have an interception overhead, we'll tell the aircraft to stay put. We won't allow it to continue taxiing in or out — we want to check the immediate surrounding doesn't have any debris that will be sucked into the engines or cause a flat tire.

The risk of misidentification and friendly fire

Luka 43:36
What about modeling a remote chance of friendly fire? We've had examples — the Ukrainian 737 shot down by Iran in January 2020. In Israeli airspace right now there's a civil-military deconfliction problem every day. What structurally prevents a similar incident?

Libby Bahat 44:26
When you have this level of cooperation and this level of intimacy — when you have pretty much the same personnel doing reserve service and then returning to their civilian job as ATC or military controllers — you have a level of intimacy that's extremely high. Controllers, civilian and military, sit shoulder to shoulder. We're looking at the military picture that's fully identified. We're not looking at a remote SA-6 station that's not connected to the civilian aerial picture.

Ben Gurion is not an asset that's claimed to be attackable by a fighter aircraft. The technical systems are there, the procedures are there. The value of human lives in Israel, in the Israeli Air Force and military, is different from the states we saw bring down civilian aircraft by accident.

Why some airlines decided not to fly to Israel

Luka 50:19
Some airlines decided not to fly into Israel in the face of all these risks. Can you unpack that, and to the extent you're aware, what did they understand about this risk that you might be under-weighting?

Libby Bahat 50:37
Eventually a country is looking at a lot of factors, and yes, economical factors are not something to be ashamed of. If Israel has 10% of the company's revenue, the decision will be different than if it were 1%. If I'm a company that has to do layovers in Tel Aviv, obviously they look at things differently.

Some airlines are built more flexible — Wizz Air, Flydubai are quicker to return. The big three American operators, Lufthansa somewhere in the middle. Virgin or EasyJet decided not to return for now. What does Virgin Atlantic see that British Airways or Lufthansa don't? It's also management time. O'Leary of Ryanair said very honestly: "I'm sick and tired of the Tel Aviv disruptions." If he has to put his managers and lawyers and accountants to deal with a country this small over and over again, that's a lot of management time that could be used to make money somewhere else.

Advice to the aviation industry

Jim Barry 53:53
What lessons from your many conflict situations do you think could apply to the broader aviation industry? What could IATA be doing differently? What could ICAO be doing differently?

Libby Bahat 54:13
If you're a regulator or a country — and I would think of Central Europe as an example of a country starting to get the effects of conflict — I would invest a lot of time, resources, and management time to work on every issue of a conflict zone and how it affects you and how you can perform the best. I would learn from others' experience. Some infrastructure should be developed years in advance. Some things like routes can be prepared a little bit easier. If you do it early and put a lot of resources in, because it's not simple, then I think you'll perform better when the conflict arrives.

Luka 55:50
Well, Libby, thank you very much for coming back to the podcast and for engaging this deeply on such an important topic.

Libby Bahat 55:57
Thank you so much. A real honor to be here. Second time is something really special, and I'm glad to bring this very important topic to everyone's attention. Thank you, guys.