18JUN

Thirteen airlines book out to October

2 min read

10:02UTC

Thirteen foreign airlines have pushed their Gulf suspensions out to October after EASA advised European carriers to avoid four countries' airspace. Etihad is still flying from Abu Dhabi.

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Key takeaway

Carriers have booked their absence from the Gulf through October, a forecast rather than a reaction.

Thirteen foreign airlines have extended suspensions of flights to the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar through October, following a bulletin from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) on 14 July advising European carriers to avoid all four countries' airspace ¹.

Carriers plan crews, slots and aircraft rotations months ahead of departure. A suspension carried as far forward as October is a commercial judgement that this war does not finish in the summer, taken by planners who lose money whichever way they are wrong. Cancel too far out and the aircraft sits idle while rivals sell the route; cancel too late and the airline is paying for crews stranded on a field that shuts without notice.

Kuwait's airport suspended flights outright last week as Gulf carriers cut their services . That was a reaction to the day's events. Booking October is something else.

Etihad Airways has not grounded operations. As of Monday 20 July it was still flying most of its network out of Zayed International Airport in Abu Dhabi, having cancelled only its Kuwait and Bahrain services in mid-July ². A Gulf carrier operating from a Gulf hub reads the same airspace differently from a European one working to an EASA bulletin, and the split is visible in the timetables.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency, a regulator that advises airlines on where it is unsafe to fly, told European carriers on 14 July to avoid the airspace over the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar. Airlines from outside Europe often follow EASA's lead because it affects their insurance and legal position even when they are not legally bound by it. Thirteen foreign airlines have now extended their suspensions of flights to those four countries all the way through October, rather than reviewing the situation week by week. Etihad Airways, based in Abu Dhabi, is the exception: it is still flying most of its network, having only cancelled flights to Kuwait and Bahrain specifically.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

EASA bulletins are advisory, not binding on non-EU carriers, but they function as a liability shield: an airline that ignores a published EASA warning and then suffers a loss over Gulf airspace faces a harder insurance and litigation position than one that followed it. That is why 13 carriers extended suspensions well beyond the EU's own jurisdiction.

Etihad's narrower response, cutting only Kuwait and Bahrain while keeping most of its network flying from Zayed International, is the one confirmed exception to that pattern. The research available does not establish why Etihad's risk calculus differs from the other 13 carriers; that gap is worth watching rather than filling in.

What could happen next?

Consequence
An October horizon gives Gulf airports and tourism-dependent carriers a fixed planning window rather than an indefinite one, but it also locks in roughly ten weeks of lost transit and inbound traffic regardless of how the conflict develops before then.

Source Landscape

This story draws on right-leaning sources from Türkiye

Türkiye

LeftRight

Immediate impact: 13 foreign carriers now hold suspensions through October rather than reviewing week by week, which converts a war-risk cost into a budgeted one. Airlines can hedge fuel and reroute crews against a known October date; insurers can price a fixed-term war-risk exclusion instead of an open-ended one.

Structural: the split matters more than the total. Etihad has cancelled only its Kuwait and Bahrain routes and kept flying most of its network from Zayed International, which shows the underlying risk pricing is being done airport by airport, not blanket-applied across the whole Gulf. Carriers are treating EASA's 14 July bulletin as a floor, not a template: some have gone further (full October suspensions), Etihad has gone narrower.

Sources:Anadolu Agency

Mentions:United Arab Emirates (UAE) →Bahrain →Kuwait →Qatar →Etihad Airways →Zayed International Airport →Abu Dhabi →European Union →Emirates →

First Reported In

Update #159 · A second strait closes by radio alone

Anadolu Agency· 22 Jul 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Kuwait's airport shuts as Gulf carriers retreat

Kuwait's outright flight suspension on 18 July is the reactive precedent against which the 13 airlines' forward booking to October reads as a forecast.

Occurred 17 Jul 2026

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This Event

Thirteen airlines book out to October

Airlines are now planning around this war as far ahead as October, which prices a forecast rather than a reaction.

Different Perspectives

Lloyd's Market Association

War-risk underwriters price the Houthis' Red Sea attacks because the group announces its targets in advance, but the unclaimed Damietta drone gives insurers a hit with no author to price against. An attack nobody claims costs shipping more than one that is claimed, since premiums are set against a known pattern, not raw damage.

US Central Command

CENTCOM has announced no strike on Iran since resuming bombing on 30 July within hours of an IRGC salvo on Jordan, and centcom.mil did not respond to requests to confirm any pause. The command has gone quiet before while a larger operation was being weighed, so silence alone proves nothing about what it has or has not done.

Hengaw

Hengaw recorded at least 67 executions in Iran during July, of which the state acknowledged only eight, and reported the 1 August execution of protest detainee Arvin Kheirkhahan at Shahrud with no advance notice to his family. A family's first notice of a death sentence is now usually the instruction to collect a body.

Egypt

Egypt's government asked media on 2 August to report the Damietta attack accurately, named no author, and said no findings will be published before its own investigation concludes. Cairo holds the debris and jurisdiction over an attack on its own soil, and naming a culprit now would pull it into a dispute it has avoided for five months.

Iran's Foreign Ministry

Araghchi called the Hormuz talks with Oman final-stage on 2 August, four days after his own deputy rejected Oman's lane proposal, and denied the Damietta drone strike as an Israeli false flag while two Iranian officials privately claimed it for Tehran. Iran's public position now contradicts itself on both files at once.

Bahrain and Kuwait

Bahraini and Kuwaiti aircraft flew their own strikes on Iranian depots in July with Emirati air cover behind them, and Ynetnews reports some Gulf capitals wanted the 2 August strike to proceed rather than stop. States that have already taken fire see a closing window on Iranian weakness, not a reason to pause.