Dominik Hertlik · March 2026 · 5 min read

The current war involving Iran began on February 28, 2026, and it has quickly grown beyond a direct Iran-Israel/US confrontation into a wider regional crisis with consequences for a wide range of sectors, most notably aviation. Over the past weeks, Iranian attacks and retaliatory exchanges have affected Gulf states and their critical infrastructure. In the first days of the conflict, Dubai International Airport (DXB) sustained damage, while airports in Abu Dhabi and Kuwait were also hit.

This matters enormously for aviation because the Gulf is not a peripheral market, but rather one of the key crossroads of global air transport for both passengers and freight, linking Europe, Asia and Africa through a hub-and-spoke model centered on Abu Dhabi (AUH) and Dubai (DXB) airports in the UAE as well as in Qatar's capital Doha (DOH). Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, passenger numbers have been constantly growing in all three of these hubs. Dubai alone accounts for more than 15% of Europe-Asia traffic, Abu Dhabi for around 3-7%, while Doha accounts for around 12%.

For the UAE economy, aviation is particularly central. An IATA report highlighted that aviation supports nearly one million jobs in the UAE and contributes to over 18% of the GDP, showcasing how deeply the sector is interlinked with trade, tourism, investment and connectivity. In the Emirate of Dubai itself, the dependence is even stronger: an Oxford Economics report cited by Emirates says aviation contributed around 27% of Dubai's GDP and supported more than 630,000 jobs.

The operational effects have been unusually visible. There have been “flights to nowhere,” sudden U-turns over Saudi Arabia or the Arabian Sea, diversions to secondary airports, and the temporary shifting of services away from primary hubs. Emirates, Etihad, Qatar Airways, and flydubai have restored many services, but only under continued uncertainty, with intermittent missile and drone alerts still triggering fresh diversions. In other words, traffic is not simply back; it is resuming in a far more fragile and contingency-driven environment.

The war is not only disrupting schedules; it is reshaping fleet management and where aircraft themselves are kept. Qatar Airways has begun sending part of its fleet to Teruel Airport in Spain, one of Europe’s best-known storage and maintenance sites, underlining how carriers are seeking to protect valuable assets from an increasingly unstable operating environment. Israel has taken a similar precautionary step at state level by moving its official presidential aircraft, the “Wings of Zion,” to Berlin airport.

In the near term, traffic will continue to return because the economic incentive is overwhelming, but the pace and durability of that return will still depend on security conditions, airspace access and the physical operability of hubs. The Gulf carriers and airports are too systemically important to regional economies, and too central to long-haul global networks, to remain frozen for long. But the question is no longer whether flights can restart. The more important question is whether passengers, airlines, insurers, lessors, and corporate travel planners will continue to view these hubs as uniquely reliable. A hub model depends not only on geography and scale, but on trust in uninterrupted access. Recent events have weakened that assumption.

It is however also worth looking at the longer-term implications, which could be substantial and may differ for Gulf and non-Gulf airlines. For Gulf carriers, the central issue is not whether they can simply diversify away from Dubai, Doha, or Abu Dhabi; they cannot. Their business models are built around those hubs. The more likely consequence is a greater focus on resilience: more conservative scheduling, stronger contingency planning, selective aircraft repositioning, higher insurance and security costs, integrated civil-defense arrangements around their aviation infrastructure and further investment in operational redundancy around their home bases. For non-Gulf airlines, the implications are somewhat different. European and Asian carriers are also tied to their own home hubs and cannot easily reinvent their networks overnight, but they may become more cautious about relying on Gulf transit corridors or codeshare exposure through the region. Where possible, some traffic may shift at the margin toward direct services, Istanbul, or alternative Asian routings, especially if customers, insurers, or corporate travel planners begin to view the Gulf as a less predictable transfer environment.