title: Turbulence in the Gulf part two: how many passengers have been stranded in transit?
author: Oliver Ranson
contenttype: article
publication: Airline Revenue Economics
published: 2026-03-11T07:31:06+00:00
sourceurl: https://revman.substack.com/p/turbulence-in-the-gulf-part-two-how
word_count: 1486
Airline bosses in the Gulf are now taking some of the hardest decisions of their careers. In the face of conflict with Iran they must first decide whether to up-gauge re-launched operations, maintain a controlled evacuation schedule or make a strategic suspension. Their decisions now will influence their market share, customer trust, brand perception and even possibly the entire future of mass market Middle Eastern aviation hubs. Next they must figure out how to handle ticket holding passengers who have either not started their journey or are part of the way through, but not actually in the Gulf. Unfortunately their rebooking policies reveal a state that is operationally savvy yet strategically underprepared. And finally they must look after their passengers stranded in transit. This group have perhaps the worst outcome of all. They are away from home in a region at war and little if any practical alternatives to get out. Monday’s article addressed the first two challenges. In today’s article I will be looking at the third. Specifically, I wanted to find out just how big a problem stranded passengers are and which hubs are most affected. I will be using schedule data and my own arrivals and departures model to answer four questions. Q1: How many passengers were arriving in Gulf airports ready to transit when airspace was closed? Q2. How many passengers were about to leave Gulf airports when airspace was closed? Q3. What was the net impact of arriving and departing passengers on transit volumes when the crisis began? Q4. Which airports were worst affected, relatively speaking? Advertisement: This article was prepared using data from OAG Schedules Analyser: visit oag.com. Thanks OAG! Q1: How many passengers were arriving in Gulf airports ready to transit when airspace was closed? I had to make four sets of assumptions to get the model going. First up was seat factor for large carriers who use the Gulf airports as their home base. I used reported average seat factors from the incumbent home carrier’s annual report. These were; Abu Dhabi = 89.9%, based on Etihad’s published Jan-26 numbers Bahrain = 81.6%, based on Gulf Air’s reported 2024 numbers Doha = 85.0% based on Qatar Airways’ 2025 annual report Dubai = 78.9% based on Emirates’ FY24-25 annual report Kuwait = 74.5% based on news reports about Kuwait Airways from 2017… Kuwait’s stat is relatively old so please treat it as indicative rather than precise. Next I needed to make assumptions about seat factor for other airlines. I used the same numbers as for the incumbent at each separate airport. The third assumption was about the proportion of passengers connecting. Arriving passengers not in transit do not have quite as raw a deal – they already had visas and hotels booked or homes to go to. They are not covered by this model. I assumed that at Abu Dhabi, Doha and Dubai 75.0% of passengers were in transit if they were on Etihad, Emirates Flydubai, Qatar Airways or (for Doha only) British Airways, who partner with Qatar Airways. For Bahrain and Kuwait I assumed 50.0% for Gulf Air and Kuwait Airways passengers. For offline transits, possibly on separate tickets, I assumed 10.0% for Abu Dhabi, Doha and Dubai. I assumed 5.0% for Bahrain and Kuwait. I also assumed that before the strikes on Iran began, the airlines were operating normally with every flight roughly on time. The chart below shows my estimate of arriving passengers at five Gulf airports on: 1. The day before the crisis began – Friday 2. On the day the crisis began (Saturday) but before the first strikes on Iran 3. The time after the crisis began just after 6am GMT but before airspace was closed just after 9am GMT (the blue box) 4. The time after airspace was closed (the orange box). The blue line represents the number of passengers set to enter transit at each time, according to my model. After airspace was closed, the blue line of passengers arriving in the orange box becomes hypothetical. Many of these passengers would have been on flights that diverted to Muscat, Riyadh or elsewhere, or turned around and headed back for home. The charts show that the timing of the strikes were bad news for all the major hubs. In Abu Dhabi the first strikes on Iran were just before an arrivals peak. This is unfortunate because many passengers will have started their airport transit just before the strikes began and not all of them will have had time to make their connections. At least it was the smallest such peak of the day. My model suggests that up to roughly 3,000 passengers an hour will have entered transit at Abu Dhabi around that time. At Doha the strikes on Iran started roughly in conjunction with their second largest arrivals peak. So Qatar Airways will have suffered the same issues as Etihad but with a higher proportion of their daily passengers. More than 6,000 passengers an hour could have entered Doha transit at this time. Dubai suffered roughly the same story, at their largest arrivals peak of the day, My model suggests that 8,000 passengers entered transit from Emirates and Flydubai, among others, in the busy hour just before the crisis began. The charts also show that the number of affected passengers transiting Bahrain and Kuwait may have been quite small. With this in mind it is easy to see why news reports focus on Abu Dhabi, Doha and Dubai. For the rest of this article I will show Bahrain and Kuwait in the charts but leave you the reader to form your own commentary on these two airports. Q2. How many passengers were about to leave Gulf airports when airspace was closed? The next set of charts show the same five airports as before, but with gross flight departures instead of arrivals. The charts show that if flights were going out on time, Etihad had almost completed their morning departures bank by the time that airspace was closed. Up to 3,000 transit passengers an hour could have escaped Abu Dhabi in time. At Dubai on the other hand, the busiest hour was over and around 9,000 transit passengers should have escaped in time. But the departures peak extends over several hours and it was likely that around 8,000 transit passengers were left behind immediately after UAE airspace was closed. My model suggests that a similar story may have been played out in Doha. Q3. What was the net impact of arriving and departing passengers on transit volumes when the crisis began? The modelling needs to get a little more complex at this stage. Unfortunately not all passengers arrive and then head off on the next flight. Some linger because their only viable connections are long. Others choose a long connection to achieve a price advantage. So I have made some more assumptions about how long passengers take to connect. These produce a new set of curves for the number of passengers in transit at any one time. Because of the “lingering” effect I mentioned, these curves are flatter and less peaky than those shown in the previous two questions. I assumed that: 1. All passengers make their connections within eight hours – with a seven hour window to connect. This is on the basis that when I was at Qatar Airways we made eight hours the lowest limit for a free Doha stopover. I doubt that many passengers with more than eight hour connections can be truly said to be in transit. 2. I assumed that two sevenths of passengers (28.6%) leave two hours after they arrive and the same proportion leave three hours afterwards This is also aligned with my experience at Qatar Airways. Many passengers enjoy rapid connections, even if some do not. 3. I assumed that one seventh of passengers (14.3%) leave four hours after arrival 4. I assumed that one fourteenth of passengers leave each hour in the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth hour after arrival. These assumptions and the same data as used to answer the previous two questions produced the results shown in the following charts. At Abu Dhabi somewhere between three and six thousand passengers are likely to have been stranded in transit. At Doha, my model suggests that around seven and a half thousand transit passengers were stranded, but possibly up to twelve thousand, almost as high as the airport can cope with. This is because the outbound peak coincided with the airspace closure. If passengers were on flights that got out in time they were lucky. And the same may be true at Dubai. Between 10,000 and 20,000 could have been stranded in transit. Q4. Which airports were worst affected, relatively speaking? The next set of charts show the same results as in the previous section. But they have been redrawn to show passengers in transit as a percentage of the day’s maximum. Read more