The Most Valuable Airspace in the World

Get your world globe out. You'll see that a polar route is often the most direct way to get from many places in the Northern Hemisphere to other places in the Northern Hemisphere, where most of us live. But there is one big problem: Russia takes up a lot of the space in those polar routes. The USSR didn't allow other countries to fly over. After the fall of the Soviet Union, they relaxed the restrictions, allowing airlines to save a lot of money, but Russia takes a big chunk of that money. They also have control of who gets to use those routes. Whenever Productions explains the complexities of polar air routes.