The Jet Fuel Crisis and Its Blind Spots
- Patrick Trancu
- May 1
- 5 min read
Jet fuel crisis: airlines are bracing for the worst. "We've never seen anything like this," a sector source tells Italy's Corriere della Sera. According to analyst projections, September could be the month European reserves hit zero. Others are calling it a "perfect storm".
Public debate is focused on cancelled flights and summer holidays at risk. Understandable. But that's not the most important part of this story — and above all, it's not yet the most serious part. Because this crisis has a two-act structure: the first act is already underway, the second is still to come.
The first trigger: prices and closed hubs
The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has produced two simultaneous effects that are rarely analysed together.
The first is visible: jet fuel prices have hit a historic record of $1,900 per tonne — nearly double pre-conflict levels. Airlines are cutting their least profitable routes, weighing every tonne loaded. The second is less visible, but more damaging for the economy: the closure of Middle Eastern airspace has neutralised Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi — the three major hubs through which a significant share of air cargo between Asia and Europe flows.
The numbers are stark. Middle East-linked routes account for 15.6% of global air cargo traffic and 18.2% of total capacity. Cargo capacity on the Asia-Europe corridor has fallen by 40%. Global air freight rates have risen to $2.98/kg, with double-digit weekly increases. China-Rotterdam maritime freight rates jumped 19% in a single week, as those who can't ship by air desperately seek space on vessels. China-Europe rail freight has absorbed the overflow and is now saturated, with surcharges exceeding $500 per container.
There is no release valve: the logistics system has congested across every channel simultaneously.
The blind spot: belly cargo
Before turning to the second trigger, it's worth naming something the evening news almost never mentions.
Around 50% of the world's air cargo doesn't fly on dedicated freighters. It flies in the holds of passenger aircraft — what the industry calls belly cargo. When a passenger flight is cancelled, that freight capacity disappears with it, silently. Pharmaceuticals, active pharmaceutical ingredients from India and China, semiconductors from Taiwan, high-value industrial components: products for which no equivalent alternative transport mode exists with the same lead times. You cannot ship by sea a pharmaceutical ingredient that needs to reach a factory in three days.
This is the structural blind spot of the crisis: the public narrative follows passengers, while the variable that actually matters for the economy is the cargo.
Photo credit: Bornil Amin su Unsplash.
The second trigger: what is still to come
The second trigger is different — and more serious. It is not a problem of prices or routes. It is a problem of physical fuel availability.
Europe depends on the Middle East for 75% of its net jet fuel imports. A Kpler note cited by Corriere della Sera warns of a "quadruple blow to jet fuel: Middle East exports near zero, Chinese exports near zero, product on tankers exhausted, refinery output falling." "The supply buffer is draining from every direction."
As of May, Europe has less than 46 days of jet fuel coverage. The critical threshold is estimated at around 23 days. If the Hormuz situation is not resolved, Europe could find itself with fewer than 8 days of coverage by September.
When the critical threshold is reached, the logic changes entirely: it is no longer a question of which routes to cut to maximise profit. It becomes a question of who gets the remaining fuel. The answer is already written: the major hubs first. Secondary airports lose connectivity suddenly, not gradually. This is not a remote hypothesis: Air BP Italy has already issued reduced availability notices and imposed per-flight refuelling caps at Linate, Bologna, Venice and Treviso. The signal is there.
And the effects extend well beyond aviation: road surfacing costs have risen 20-30%, and the shortage of urea from the Gulf has pushed fertiliser prices up by more than 50%. The crisis is spreading in widening circles.
Not the first time. And not the last.
There is a question that those working in crisis management have been asking for years, and which this situation makes urgent again: exactly when did we begin living in a state of perma-crisis?
Consider the past twenty-five years. 2001 and the Twin Towers attacks, which reshaped global geopolitics. 2003 and SARS, the first full-scale rehearsal for a respiratory pandemic. 2008 and the financial crash. 2015 and the migration crisis, which fractured Europe politically. 2020 and Covid-19, which stopped the world and exposed the fragility of global supply chains. 2022 and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which sent European energy security into crisis. And now, in 2026, the conflict with Iran, the Hormuz blockade, and the collapse of petroleum derivatives supply.
It is not just that crises are following one another. They are accelerating. The interval between one systemic shock and the next has shortened. And many do not close: they overlap, interlock, feed each other. The pandemic had not yet been absorbed when the war in Ukraine arrived. The war had not been resolved when the Iran conflict broke out. Each new shock hits a system already weakened by the previous one, without having had time to find a new equilibrium. We have moved from the era of instability that opened in Manhattan in 2001 to the current era of permanent uncertainty.
Crisis management scholars have a name for this condition: permacrisis. Not a crisis that lasts a long time. Crisis as the normal state — the permanent context within which organizations, and people, must learn to operate.
What changes, and will not change back
In this context, the jet fuel crisis is not an anomaly. It is the latest confirmation of a structural tendency: global systems are so interconnected that a shock at one point propagates everywhere, often in ways no one predicted. This is complexity. The missing Middle Eastern kerosene disrupts European logistics. European logistics grinding to a halt stops factories. Factories slowing down drag their suppliers, customers and supply chains with them.
The trend set in motion by the pandemic — reducing dependence on distant suppliers, building up inventories, creating redundancy — is not reversed by this crisis. It is accelerated, and for many sectors made irreversible. Those who had already begun this recalibration find themselves more resilient today. Those who delayed now face doing it under emergency conditions: costs are higher, time is short, alternatives are already taken by those who moved first.
The jet fuel crisis will pass, as the others did. But the world we find on the other side will not be the one we left behind. The fractures it has caused run deep — some already visible, others still to surface in the months and years ahead.
Resilience is no longer an extraordinary response to extraordinary events. It is the ordinary competence of our time. And those who have not yet understood this have — perhaps — a few weeks left to begin.
