U.S. planes barred from flying over parts of Mideast

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The U.S. today barred American-registered aircraft from flying over parts of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman amid heightened tensions after Iran’s Revolutionary Guard shot down a U.S. military drone.

The announcement from the Federal Aviation Administration came after an Iranian surface-to-air missile on Thursday brought down the U.S. Navy RQ-4A Global Hawk, an unmanned aircraft with a wingspan larger than a Boeing 737 jetliner and costing over $100 million.

The FAA previously warned commercial aircraft of the possibility of Iranian anti-aircraft gunners mistaking them for military aircraft, a warning dismissed by Tehran some 30 years after the U.S. Navy shot down an Iranian passenger jet.

There are “heightened military activities and increased political tensions in the region, which present an inadvertent risk to U.S. civil aviation operations and potential for miscalculation or misidentified,” the FAA said. “The risk to U.S. civil aviation is demonstrated by the Iranian surface-to-air missile shoot down of a U.S. unmanned aircraft system on 19 June 2019 while it was operating in the vicinity of civil air routes above the Gulf of Oman.

There was no immediate reaction in Iran to the announcement.

The Persian Gulf is home to some of the world’s top long-haul carriers, who already have been battered by Trump’s travel bans targeting a group of predominantly Muslim countries, as well as an earlier ban on laptops in airplane cabins for Mideast carriers.

Iran said the drone “violated” its territorial airspace.