Indonesia’s Haze Crisis: How Forest Fires Are Grounding Flights Across the Region

What exactly has the haze disrupted, and on what scale?

Indonesia’s seasonal forest fires have done more than cloud the skies. Between August 11 and October 19, haze from these fires disrupted a total of 2,604 domestic flights, according to figures released on October 20 by Indonesia’s Transportation Ministry. Of those, more than half — 1,420 flights — were either cancelled or postponed outright, while a further 1,129 suffered delays. Twenty-three flights were diverted to alternative airports, six returned to their points of departure, and 26 were rescheduled to depart earlier than planned. The scale of the disruption is not incidental; it reflects a structural vulnerability in Indonesia’s aviation network to an environmental phenomenon that recurs with near-predictable regularity each dry season.

The ministry’s director-general of air transportation, Lukman F Laisa, confirmed the figures, noting that operational decisions were being made in accordance with weather conditions and safety assessments. “Flight schedule adjustments can be made if conditions on the ground do not allow operations to proceed safely,” Laisa said, as quoted by state news agency Antara. The framing is careful and procedural, as one would expect from a ministry managing both public confidence and operational liability simultaneously.

Which airports and routes have been worst affected?

The disruptions have spread across Indonesia’s archipelago with uneven but significant reach. Airports in West Kalimantan’s Pontianak, Riau’s Pekanbaru, and South Sumatra’s Palembang — all regions historically prone to peat and forest fires — have featured prominently among affected hubs. Further afield, Palu’s Mutiara SIS Al-Jufrie Airport in Central Sulawesi and Ternate’s Sultan Babullah Airport in North Maluku province have also reported disruptions, illustrating how smoke particulates and reduced visibility can propagate operationally across a geography as vast as Indonesia’s.

The mechanism is straightforward but consequential: haze reduces visibility around airports, directly impairing the conditions required for safe take-offs, landings, and ground movements. When visibility falls below prescribed minimums, flight operations must be suspended or curtailed regardless of commercial pressure. For an archipelagic nation where domestic aviation is often the only practical mode of inter-island transport, even temporary airport closures carry disproportionate economic and logistical weight.

How has this affected Singapore specifically?

Fourteen international flights involving Singapore have been cancelled as a direct result of the haze. Twelve round-trip services between Singapore and Pontianak were cancelled between September 12 and September 23, while a further two flights between Singapore and Palembang were cancelled on October 15. These are not high-frequency trunk routes — Singapore–Pontianak and Singapore–Palembang serve relatively specialised demand, including business travel, migrant worker movement, and regional trade connections — but their cancellation signals how transboundary haze can fracture bilateral connectivity at the margins where it matters most to ordinary travellers.

Singapore’s exposure to Indonesian haze is a well-documented and politically sensitive issue. The two countries share a complex relationship on the subject, governed in part by the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution, which Indonesia ratified only in 2014 after years of regional pressure. Progress on enforcement of fire-prevention measures on Indonesian territory has been gradual and contested, and each haze season reopens questions about regulatory effectiveness and corporate accountability in the plantation sector.

Has the disruption spread beyond Indonesia and Singapore?

The regional footprint of this haze episode extends to Malaysia as well. Low-cost carrier FireFly suspended its service between Subang in Selangor and Singapore for approximately one week before resuming operations on Thursday. The temporary grounding of a Malaysian domestic-to-regional route underscores that haze is not merely an Indonesian domestic aviation problem — it is a regional air-quality and airspace management challenge with cross-border operational consequences. Each affected airline, airport authority, and national civil aviation regulator must make independent decisions based on localised visibility readings, yet the underlying cause is shared and transboundary in nature.

What this episode reinforces, once again, is that Southeast Asia’s aviation connectivity — a genuine economic achievement of the past two decades — remains exposed to environmental disruptions that regional governance frameworks have not yet fully resolved. The flights will resume when the smoke clears. The structural question of how ASEAN member states coordinate on fire prevention, land-use enforcement, and aviation contingency planning is considerably harder to answer.