Airplanes can be seen flying continuously everywhere on our planet except a large chunk of a place in Asian continent. Almost all of the world's airplanes appears to be avoiding this geographical region called as Tibetan plateau. This least habitable place is one of the world's biggest wasteland. It is also known as the “ roof of the world” owing to it's average elevation which is around 4500 metres. This highest geographical region has a population of just over 14 million, and is considered as one of the sparsely populated regions of the world apart from Antarctica and Northern Greenland.
Planes do occassionally fly over the Tibetan plateau but if possible they avoid flying over Tibet.The Tibetan plateau has only two important international airports called Lhasa and Xining and these airports are mostly engaged in handling domestic air travel.
Planes flying over Tibetan plateau are exposed to significant challenges that can risk the lives of everyone present there.In mountainous region like Tibetan plateau one has to deal with a variety of unpredictable weather conditions. Planes flying over Tibetan plateau can experience uncontrollably strong turbulence, due to wind speed reaching upto 200 miles/ hour. In mountainous region like Tibetan plateau temperature falls even lower than -40 degree Celsius and at this temperature it is likely to happen that airplanes fuel will freeze. Since standard freezing point of a standard jet fuel is -47 degree centigrade.
Apart from these obstacles the most challenging aspect of flying over Tibetan plateau is executing an emergency landing. Critical situations like cabin depressurization or engine failure requires an emergency landing. Performing emergency landing at a place whose average elevation is over fourteen thousand feet, clearly exceeding the permissible limit of ten thousand feet is clearly dangerous. While descending oxygen masks are dropped for the passengers with limited supply of oxygen which lasts for around twenty minutes. So basically this oxygen masks help passengers breathe until the plane descends down to an elevation ten thousand feet. An extra minute more than twenty minutes would certainly result into crashing of the plane killing every one inside.
A part of this problem can be solved because there are aircrafts designed to fly over mountains by having an alternating oxygen system for passengers which can supply oxygen upto several hours. The problem of unexpected weather conditions which can be expected anywhere but still remains most common in mountainous region is surely a matter of concern.
