A reported drone strike near Dubai International Airport (DXB) earlier today resulted in the airport suspending operations for a few hours. However, Dubai International has since resumed the limited operations it was running prior to the strike, with airlines such as Emirates and FlyDubai continuing to operate limited schedules for the time being.

A week since the conflict began, and flight schedule data shows the extent to which connectivity has been disrupted, not just in the Middle East region, but the entire global aviation sector. This report will look into the data of flight disruptions between the UK and the Middle East, and beyond, to get a deeper understanding of the impact this conflict has on the aviation industry.

An Extremely Unpredictable Environment

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The past week has seen various airlines and airports in the region make multiple announcements, quite often within hours of each other, keeping passengers and travellers up to date with the latest information. While initially, the countries in the direct vicinity of the conflict had shut down their airspaces entirely, since then, countries such as the United Arab Emirates and (more recently) Qatar have opened up certain flight corridors to the south, for repatriation flights and limited services to resume. This has allowed operations to resume at hubs such as Dubai International, Abu Dhabi, and Doha airports.

However, it has been far from consistent, with reports from BBC indicating that just this morning, DXB suspended its operations for a few hours citing safety reasons due to a reported strike near the airport, which resulted in further delays and even diversions, as seen on FlightRadar24 in the case of an Emirates service inbound from London Heathrow Airport, which diverted to Al Ain Airport, before making the short hop back to DXB once the airport resumed operations.

The volatility and rapid developments have had airlines in the region, and carriers around the world operating to the region are urging their passengers to always await confirmation regarding their flights before showing up at the airport.

Over 70 Flights Cancelled Between The UK & Middle East

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Analyzing the data from the aviation analytics firm Cirium, data for today’s schedule shows that a total of 74 flights have been cancelled between the Middle East and the United Kingdom alone. The reason for such high numbers is that the UK is a major European market for most Middle Eastern carriers, especially for the three largest in the region, including Emirates, Qatar Airways, and Etihad Airways. So what do the numbers actually indicate?

From the 74 cancelled services, 34 are outbound services from the UK, accounting for 23.13% of all flights to the Middle East, while the remaining 40 cancelled flights account for 27.59% of all flights to the UK from the region. Most notably, services between Bahrain and the UK, along with Qatar and the UK, saw the highest cancellations at the time of writing, with all four services between the former being marked as cancelled (100%), while 15 of the 16 services between the latter also being marked as cancelled (94%). This is not entirely surprising because the Bahraini airspace has been shut since the conflict started a week ago, while the Qatari airspace has only recently been opened for limited evacuation flights (not commercial).

Other airports in the region are seeing relatively lower cancellations, with the UK – UAE route seeing 29 out of 66 flights cancelled (44%), the UK – Saudi Arabia route only seeing two out of the 20 flights cancelled (10%), while the routes between the UK and Oman, Lebanon, and Egypt see no cancellations. Kuwait, Jordan, and Israel each have one of their daily rotations cancelled.

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Over 1,300 Flights Cancelled To The Middle East

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When looking beyond the UK, the number of flights cancelled into the Middle East region becomes staggering. Once again, it is worth keeping in mind that a considerable portion of these cancellations are based on the three major hubs in the region – Dubai International Airport (DXB), Doha Hamad International Airport (DOH), and Abu Dhabi International Airport (AUH), along with their respective carriers, Emirates, Qatar Airways, and Etihad. As such, the data indicates that of the 1,355 flights cancelled into the region for today, 766 flight cancellations (56.5%) are attributed to the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, which encompasses these three hubs.

The overall country-wise summary for flight cancellations into the Middle East region is as follows:

Cirium’s data also includes Turkey within the Middle East region, with the country seeing 62 flights cancelled, accounting for 3.9% of the country’s overall schedule. Overall, from the 5,338 flights scheduled into the Middle East today, a total of 1,355 flights were cancelled (25.38%).

Meanwhile, several airlines such as Lufthansa, Aegean Airlines, British Airways and Oman Air are also adding additional services to places such as Oman, to provide capacity alongside government-chartered repatriation flights.