Dubai airport
March 21, 2026
Arab News
By Jonathan Gornall
Up until about 0630 UTC on Feb. 28, air traffic over the Gulf and the wider region was operating normally.
The usual streams of aircraft heading to and from Asia were converging over the Strait of Hormuz, joining or leaving the conveyor belt of jets travelling along the waterway between Iran and the Gulf states.
As usual, some of the stream peeled off to head west for Riyadh and Jeddah, while aircraft bound for Europe carried on along the well-worn two-way aerial highway, passing over Iraq and Turkey.
Iranian airspace was busy, too, with large numbers of aircraft heading to and from destinations across eastern Europe.
Unnoticed at the time in the general clutter, a lone US Air Force Boeing KC-135R Stratotanker, an air-to-air refueling aircraft, was in a holding pattern over the Mediterranean island of Crete.
And then, at about 0620 UTC, the first reports of explosions in Tehran began to circulate.
Shortly afterwards, observers at global flight tracking company Flightradar24 began to notice something unusual. Aircraft flying over Iran had started to scatter, like a flock of birds startled by a gunshot.
Flightradar24 uses satellites and about 60,000 ground receivers around the world to collect and analyze in real time the constant stream of data being broadcast by the transponders with which all aircraft are fitted.
“The primary function of the transponder is that it greatly increases safety, by sending data to air traffic controllers and to tell other aircraft ‘I’m here, don’t hit me,’” said Ian Petchenik, director of communications for Flightradar24.
As he spoke, there were 19,282 aircraft in the air globally.
But the transponder also gives Flightradar24 a complete real-time picture of all aircraft movements around the world, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
And by 0705 on Feb. 28, that picture showed that the line of aircraft travelling up and down the Gulf to Iraq had been abruptly severed. Now, as aircraft fled the scene, the only movement was northwards.
Over the lower Gulf, the once orderly procession of aircraft had coalesced into two distinct clumps, circling over Bahrain and Qatar and Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
New aerial highways were quickly developing. One diverted aircraft over Oman and along the bottom edge of the Arabian Peninsula.
Europe-bound traffic that normally would have been using the Gulf-Iraq corridor headed west over Riyadh to join a north-south stream of aircraft forming over the Red Sea.
By 0745, but for a lone Russian Ural Airlines Airbus A320, out of Yekaterinburg and bound for Dubai, Iranian airspace was completely empty of commercial traffic.
Military aircraft must also have transponders, and “in general, if they’re operating in commercial airspace they need to have a transponder on, unless there is a mission-critical reason not to do so,” Petchenik said.
That explains why none of the Israeli or US jets that have been attacking Iran can be tracked by commercial systems such as Flightradar24.
However, over the past two weeks, the US Air Force has chosen to leave the transponders on its air-to-air refueling tankers switched on.
At any one time, up to a dozen Boeing KC-135R Stratotankers have been shuttling back and forth between Tel Aviv and the Gulf coast over Kuwait, where presumably they are refueling the bombers attacking targets in Iran.
But having their transponders on did not prevent two of the Stratotankers colliding over western Iraq on March 12, killing all six crew members on board one of the aircraft.
By 0800 on Feb. 28, most of the aircraft still jostling for landing slots in Qatar, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and Dubai belonged to local national airlines and were coming home to roost.
Amid the frantic scramble to re-route and land flights, that day air traffic controllers were earning their pay.
Typical of the uncertainty and chaos that morning was the disrupted journey of Fly Dubai flight 1549. Bound for Tel Aviv, it had taken off from Dubai at 0331. It had got as far as Jordan, circling a few times over Queen Alia International Airport, before turning tail and heading back to base.
By 0900, the passengers were back on the ground in Dubai, where their stress-filled journey had begun five and a half hours earlier.
By 1000, the skies over the Gulf were completely clear.
Since then, air travel in the Gulf has remained seriously and expensively disrupted. But, even as the war enters its third week, and Iranian attacks show little sign of letting up, national carriers are cautiously trying to return to pre-war schedules.
Stefano Baronci, director general of Airports Council International Asia-Pacific and Middle East, said the region’s aviation industry “has proven to be among the most resilient in the world.”
He told Arab News that the current disruption is no comparison to the one caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which he called, “the most severe shock in the history of aviation globally.”
The current disruption is “geographically more limited,” Baronci said, “although it is nevertheless causing significant disruptions to air traffic in the region.”
However, he added that Gulf states and Jordan “are showing a high degree of resilience, enhancing their operational coordination.”
He said: “Airports in Saudi Arabia and Oman have played a pivotal role to secure connectivity within the region and beyond, welcoming airlines and passengers from neighboring countries more impacted by the conflict, with legacy carriers from Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain relocating operational bases to other airports.
“The current situation has highlighted the value of close coordination among GCC aviation authorities, with regulators and air navigation service providers demonstrating that regional cooperation is essential to maintaining airspace resilience and operational efficiency.”
Baronci believes that “spirit of cooperation” will empower the imminent GCC Aviation Authority — announced in December — to drive the region toward an integrated aviation market.
The resilience, nonetheless, comes at a high cost. The financial pressures on all airlines affected by the war are enormous, Petchenik said.
“Much depends on how long this war goes on,” he said. “Obviously, places like Dubai and Abu Dhabi are losing important tourist spend, but airlines like Emirates and Etihad are protected to a certain extent because they are state-owned.
“If this were happening outside of the Middle East, I would expect to see some airlines fail in short order. But, as COVID showed us, national flag carriers are too important to a country to see fail.
“If we were talking about a low-cost carrier in the US which didn’t have state support — like Spirit Airlines in Florida, or Allegiant Air in Vegas, kind of akin to Jazeera Airways in Kuwait — I would say a month of complete shutdown might be irrecoverable.”
But for any airline, the costs that are not being offset by airfare income are huge — and could lead to compensatory hikes in ticket prices after the war finally ends.
“You have nothing coming in and a lot going out — you’re still paying ground crew, flight crew and cabin crew. It costs money to park aircraft, and you’re still paying leases or the interest on loans.”
Insurance policies are another cost that cannot be offset when aircraft are not flying.
There are, however, savings to be made when aircraft are idle — on fuel, which is a major cost, and on the many fees which have to be paid. These include “overflight fees” or “en-route air navigation charges,” which are paid to countries aircraft fly over and are calculated according to the distance flown and the weight of the aircraft.
RDC, an air industry data company that analyzes the extremely complex issue of charges for airlines, calculates that a Boeing 777-300ER with a take-off weight of 340 tons would be charged $16,800 to fly from Heathrow to Shanghai.
Parking an aircraft anywhere other than at its base is also expensive, which is why most carriers scrambled to get their jets back home as soon as the war began.
Over the past two weeks, Petchenik said, “we have of course seen a general decrease in commercial traffic, but we have also been seeing increased traffic from other airlines — not commensurate with the loss from the Gulf airlines, necessarily, but other airlines have been picking up the slack, so there has been a smaller decrease than I had expected.”
One day last week, for example, “Air India and Air India Express launched something like an additional 32 flights. They were not necessarily operating on the routes that airlines such as Emirates would operate on, but they are bringing Indian nationals back to India,” he said.
“So, there were very few flights coming out of Dubai, but there were a few out of Sharjah, Ras Al-Khaimah and Muscat, and a few out of Riyadh — from as many regional hubs as they could find.
While King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh has had fewer flights than normal, it is still open, although advising passengers that some flights might be delayed, rescheduled or cancelled, mainly due to bottlenecks created by regional airspace restrictions.
However, it may have benefited from the increase in overflight fees which it has been able to charge flights rerouted over Saudi Arabia from the Gulf.
“Saudi Arabia has been balancing the decrease in flights that would have operated from Qatar or the UAE with the increased number of overflights from other airlines, so maybe it has been experiencing a net flat rather than a loss,” Petchenik said.
By March 7, despite signs that the war was escalating, Flightradar24’s data showed that the regional airspace had begun to reopen partially, with airlines such as Emirates and Etihad starting to offer reduced flight schedules.
For example, from Feb. 28 to March 2, all Emirates flights from London Heathrow to Dubai were cancelled. On March 3, two flights got through and thereafter the number of flights began to creep up daily.
By March 10, there were six scheduled flights — the same as normal — and that number has held steady ever since.
Emirates has been wary of revealing its flight resumption timeline after Iranian drones targeted Dubai International Airport just hours after the airline announced plans to restore capacity to 60 percent of pre-war levels. Unconfirmed media reports said Dubai’s government was eyeing a return to 100 percent capacity by March 29.
That resolve was tested on March 16, when an Iranian drone struck a fuel tank near Dubai International Airport, sparking a fire. Flights were temporarily halted, but firefighters contained the blaze and operations resumed within hours.
Meanwhile, the war continues — and, following the bombing of military infrastructure on Kharg Island, the terminal from which 90 percent of Iran’s oil is shipped, and the US announcement that a Marines expeditionary force is on its way to the Gulf — the conflict seems likely to escalate even further.
On March 14, at about 0700 in the morning, the only aircraft with its transponder on over the Gulf was an MQ-4C Triton, a high-altitude, long-endurance surveillance drone operated by the US Navy. Flying at about 48,000ft, it was circling near the Iranian coastline between Bushehr and Kharg Island.
For several hours on Thursday, a Triton reappeared on station in the vicinity of Kharg Island. And as of 1630 UTC, US Air Force KC-135 Stratotankers, flying from Tel Aviv and Crete, could be seen on Flightradar24 continuing their round-the-clock refueling runs both over the Gulf and into Iraqi airspace.
At the same time, a Boeing B-52H Stratofortress, a US Air Force heavy bomber capable of carrying a variety of air-to-ground munitions, was approaching Middle East airspace over the coast of Israel. It had flown from Royal Air Force Fairford in the UK.
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