Three weeks into the most severe aviation crisis since the pandemic, the dividing line across the industry is becoming clear. Operational agility: The ability to make fast, credible decisions when the ground is shifting daily and the rulebook has been set aside, has once again emerged as the determining factor.
The scale of what the industry is absorbing deserves to be stated plainly. Around 50,000 flights have been cancelled since hostilities began on 28 February. At the peak of the disruption, over half of all departing flights from Gulf airports could not operate normally.
The Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately one fifth of global oil demand passes, is severely disrupted, sending Brent crude above $109 a barrel and jet fuel prices to levels that have doubled in ten days.
Under normal circumstances, Gulf carriers would right now be deep in preparations for the Eid holiday travel period, one of the busiest and most commercially important windows of the quarter. Outbound travel from the Gulf surges at Eid. Families travel, leisure bookings fill premium cabins, and airlines count on the revenue. This year, those preparations have been replaced by crisis management.
The contrast with where the industry expected to be at this point in 2026 could hardly be sharper.
When Qatari airspace closed and Hamad International Airport operations fell silent, Qatar Airways built an alternative operational structure from scratch. The airline established a secondary base in Riyadh, using Saudi airspace and infrastructure to stage repatriation flights for passengers stranded across the region. Working simultaneously from Muscat and Riyadh, it organised relief flights and secured special governmental permissions to operate what are known as network-to-network services.
The concept is worth explaining. Under normal operations, a passenger travelling from Bangkok to Madrid would connect through Doha. With Doha closed, Qatar Airways secured regulatory approval to operate the aircraft directly between Bangkok and Madrid, cutting out the Doha transit entirely and getting passengers to their destination city in a single movement. The same logic applied to Kathmandu and London, and several other city pairs across its network. Each of these operations required fresh route permissions, commercial agreements and crew planning, achieved within hours. Special flights were also arranged for cruise ship passengers and seafarers, two groups who tend to fall between the gaps when standard repatriation frameworks are applied.
Back in Doha, the airline was simultaneously managing a different problem. When airspace closed without warning, approximately 8,000 passengers found themselves stranded mid-transit at Hamad International Airport, having arrived from one city with a connection to another that could no longer operate.
Qatar Airways accommodated all of them in hotels while the situation developed, and until the Qatar Civil Aviation Authority authorised the use of a limited safe operating corridor: In effect, a single approved routing through the airspace, available during defined time windows, through which aircraft could move safely. Once that corridor opened, the airline worked through its rebooking backlog and began moving passengers onward.
Qatar Airways has this week restarted a limited commercial schedule to and from Doha, including multiple daily frequencies to key cities such as London, and has extended tier status across its Privilege Club loyalty programme. Most of Qatari airspace, however, remains closed today, as the regional situation continues to unfold. Emirates has operated in a different register throughout. The size of its network means any restart is a significant undertaking, and so is any suspension. The airline moved through multiple rounds of capacity increases followed by full operational halts as Dubai International Airport came under direct threat from drone strikes on at least four occasions. When a fuel depot at the airport was struck in mid-March, services were partially redirected to Al Maktoum International.
Emirates has consistently signalled intent to restore full operations at each available window, and the stop-start reality since then reflects not a lack of effort but the conditions of running the world’s largest international hub inside what has now become an active conflict zone.
Etihad, operating from Abu Dhabi, has taken the most cautious approach of the three. The airline spent the acute phase of the crisis at a fraction of normal capacity and has been rebuilding its schedule carefully and quietly. Its preference for stability over speed has been evident throughout, and there has been little of the network-level improvisation visible elsewhere. How that positioning lands commercially as competitors move to rebuild passenger relationships is a question the coming months will answer.
Bahrain’s Gulf Air entered this crisis in a structurally exposed position. Heavily dependent on a single hub, Bahrain International Airport has been closed to civilian traffic since February 28 with no reopening timeline in sight. Without access to its own airport or its own airspace, the options were limited.
The airline’s response was to establish a working operational base at King Fahd International Airport in Dammam, in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, running long-haul services to London, Mumbai, Bangkok, Frankfurt and Nairobi from Saudi soil.
Passengers in Bahrain were offered complimentary bus transfers across the King Fahd Causeway to Dammam, with Saudi transit visas coordinated by the airline for those who needed them. The Dammam schedule has since expanded to include Cairo, Casablanca and Chennai. What started as a temporary repatriation measure has grown into a functioning interim network, and the practicalities of delivering that, without your own airport, without your own airspace, with ground transport built into the passenger journey, are considerable. One of the more striking illustrations of how thoroughly this crisis has redrawn the map of global aviation is visible over the South Caucasus. Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, three small countries whose combined airspace would barely register on a normal day of global traffic, have become one of the primary corridors linking Europe and Asia.
Georgian airspace alone has gone from handling around 642 flights per day to a record 1,500 to 2,000 daily movements as airlines reroute north to avoid the closed Gulf corridor. Armenia and Azerbaijan are carrying equivalent increases. It is a narrow strip of sky, handling traffic volumes it was never designed to absorb, and its fragility was underlined in early March when Iranian drones crossed into Azerbaijan and struck the terminal building at Nakhchivan airport. The incident temporarily closed part of the southern Baku airspace and served as a reminder that the alternative corridors now carrying the weight of global aviation are not themselves insulated from the conflict.
European carriers have largely suspended services to Gulf and Levant destinations, and the windows being published now signal that few expect a rapid return. British Airways has suspended Abu Dhabi services until the end of the year, cancelled Dubai flights through to the end of June, and pulled Amman, Bahrain and Doha from sale through to the end of April and beyond. The Lufthansa Group has extended suspensions across the region into April. Air France and KLM have adjusted accordingly.
The more revealing story in Europe, however, is not the route suspensions. It is the fuel. Scandinavian Airlines this week announced the cancellation of at least 1,000 flights in April, on top of several hundred already removed from March. SAS chief executive Anko van der Werff told Swedish media that jet fuel has doubled in price in ten days and that the shock hits the industry directly.
The affected routes are primarily short-haul domestic services within Norway. SAS has no meaningful direct exposure to the Middle East as a destination market, which is precisely the point. An energy market disruption originating in the Gulf is now cutting capacity on intra-Nordic routes, and it will not be the last such consequence to surface across Europe.
For passengers connecting between Asia and Europe, the crisis has produced a fare environment that in several markets has become genuinely difficult to absorb. Bloomberg has reported Asia-Europe airfares rising by as much as 900% on specific routes as Gulf carrier capacity collapsed and alternatives filled quickly.
Passengers across Southeast Asia have been sharing fares approaching $10,000 for one-way economy tickets to European cities, journeys that would ordinarily cost a fraction of that. One-way fares on Bangkok to London, which ordinarily sit around $870, have been quoted above $3,000.
Hong Kong to London, typically priced between $600 and $1,400, has reached $2,500 on certain dates, with premium economy and business class fares on the same routes climbing considerably further.
A round trip from Sydney to London that was priced at $1,500 before the crisis has been quoted above $2,700 in recent weeks. Eight Middle Eastern airlines serving Thailand suspended operations simultaneously, pushing demand onto Thai Airways, Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines at speed. Cathay has added extra frequencies to London and Zurich to absorb what it can. Singapore Airlines is recording its strongest forward bookings in over a year. Air India has added 36 flights across Delhi-London, Mumbai-London, Delhi-Frankfurt, Delhi-Zurich and Delhi-Toronto corridors before the end of March, adding over 10,000 seats where capacity is tight and prices reflect it.
What this crisis has continued to demonstrate, more than anything, is that agility is not a capability reserved for leaner carriers. It is a requirement at every scale. The Gulf mega-hub model was constructed on the assumption of continuous, uninterrupted access to airspace. That assumption has been stress-tested recently in a way it never has before.
Single-hub dependency, even for carriers of this size and global reach, leaves an airline with limited options when the airspace around that hub closes without warning and stays closed. The airlines that have adapted most effectively are those that moved fastest, remain the most flexible. In a crisis of this kind, that instinct is worth more than the size of a fleet or the breadth of a route map.
The author is an aviation analyst.
X handle: @AlexInAir.