As Airports Shut Across The Mideast, These Airlines Kept Flying After Losing Their Home Bases To War

Gulf Air is doing something few national carriers ever have to do. Bahrain’s airspace has been shut by the war with Iran – largely because Iran keeps lashing out at civilian targets in neighboring countries that haven’t attacked it. So they’ve moved several Gulf Air aircraft and some cargo planes to Saudi Arabia – and it’s operating flights from there, largely to repatriate residents. Thanks to One Mile at a Time for flaggin this.

They aren’t quite an ‘airline in exile’ yet. Gulf Air isn’t re-founding itself abroad. That’s actually something we’ve seen several times when a home country’s airspace becomes unusable.

• Kuwait Airways. Before Iraq invaded, the carrier served 50 cities. After August 1990, management operated from Cairo. They kept flying from New York JFK (for instance they flew non-stop London Heathrow service back then, which later became complicated because they refused travel on the route to passengers with Israeli passports in violation of U.S. law.

  During the war, Iraq took 15 of the 23 Kuwait Airways planes, repainint several of them. After the country was liberated by U.S. forces, the airline restarted operation in May 1991.

• Palestinian Airlines. It was based at Gaza airport. That was a hopeful time for the creation of Palestine, with real offers of an independent state on the table in exchange for peace and massive international investment. Those offers were rejected, and in response to the Second Intifada and killing of Israeli soldiers, the airport’s runways were bulldozed and its radio and control towers were destroyed. It was just too easy to launch air attacks from the airport.

  In Nov 1998, the Clintons and the Arafats, American and Palestinian first couples, inaugurated the Gaza International Airport. Gaza also had a port and a casino planned. Hamas never accepted peace with #Israel. To sabotage it, Hamas launched dozens of suicide bombings between… pic.twitter.com/g84NYHUoeB

  — Hussain Abdul-Hussain (@hahussain) October 13, 2023

  Palestinian Airlines moved to El-Arish in Egypt, about 28 miles away. They were a flag carrier flying exclusively out of another country. It wasn’t viable, though, because Egypt took a full day to process Palestinians crossing the border.

  

  Eventually the airline shut down in 2005, though they briefly restarted service again in 2012 before leasing their aircraft to Niger Airlines. Those planes were returned in summer 2020, and the airline formally shut down in 2021.

  
  Palestinian Airlines Fokker 50, credit: Bram Steeman via Wikimedia Commons

• Air France is often described as having “moved to Casablanca” during the Second World War, but the airline actually split in two – an “Occupied Air France” and a “Free Air France” umanaged from Damascus in 1943, with reduced operations based in North Africa.

  The airlines were re-combined in Réseau des Lignes Aériennes Françaises in 1944, which reclaimed the Air France name in 1946. But that’s why Humphrey Bogart puts Ingrid Bergman on an Air France plane from Casablanca to Lisbon, sending her away with her husband Viktor Laszlo.

• KLM couldn’t operate out of Amsterdam during the German occupation, and much of the fleet and equipment were destroyed. Its West Indies company remained flying, and KLM crews used one of the few surviving aircraft to operate the Bristol – Lisbon service for BOAC.

  The West Indies airline connected the region withthe Americas from the Antilles, starting in 1936 with Curaçao–Aruba and then extending to Maracaibo. It’s KLM’s colonies that drove this, and today still KLM flies, for instance, to Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Sint Maarten, and Paramaribo.

  KLM didn’t mirror operations elsewhere, but kept a fragment alive overseas until the Netherlands was liberated. Then they restored its domestic network and resumed service to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia after liberation.

  
  Amsterdam airport

  KLM also, by the way, has fifth freedom routes that date to its colonial history, but this flying did not continue through the war because the Japanese overran the Dutch East Indies, with 11 planes escaping to Australia. (The assets of the local KLM carrier eventually became the basis for Garuda Indonesia.) Today they still fly Singapore – Bali and Kuala Lumpur – Jakarta.

  

• Cyprus Airways lost its Nicosia home with the 1974 Turkish invasion, and moved south to Larnaca in February 1975 where it’s based today. Their exile was inside of the same country.

• Sudan Airways moved operations from Khartoum to Port Sudan when the capital airport was damaged in the first weeks of the country’s 2023 war. Last month, Sudan Airways returned with a flight Port Sudan to Khartoum. During the war they retreated with the government to the fallback city on the Red Sea and waited for the main airport to become usable again, which is not unlike what Gulf Air is doing – though Gulf Air is doing it in a nearby country.

Gulf Air is now moving passengers back and forth by road into Saudi Arabia and flying long-haul segments from Dammam because Bahrain cannot safely function as a hub. It doesn’t happen often, but we’ve seen airlines move their planes, move their passengers and keep operating from somewhere else.