News / Air freight activity in the Gulf continues recovery, but pace slows

In contrast to the added uncertainty for ocean shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, air freight in the Gulf continues to recover, albeit at a slower pace than seen during the military conflict, according to DHL.

At its latest Middle East ‘navigating disruption’ webinar with customers yesterday, the company unveiled plans to next week launch a B777 freighter flight from its European hub in Leipzig to Dubai (DXB) – the security situation permitting. The service having previously featured in DHL’s air network.

The schedule is for five weekly flights, the full routing reading Leipzig-Dubai-Hong Kong.

“With Dubai, we will have three connections into the Middle East, the others being in Riyadh and Muscat in Oman,” said Paul Dowling DHL Express’ customer operations manager, Middle East & North Africa.

DHL is also now serving Jeddah from Liège with a thrice-weekly B474F service dedicated to pharma and life science shipments.

The Dubai flight will also take some of the pressure off Riyadh and Muscat, which have served as backup hubs since hostilities began, added Mr Dowling.

“We will continue with the Riyadh and Muscat operations, certainly until the end of April and until we see how the situation in the region evolves.”

Another sign of the gradual recovery in air transport in the Gulf region is the re-opening of commercial airspace in both Iraq and Bahrain, where DHL Express has its hub for the MENA region.

“We were able to utilise a commercial flight yesterday from Erbil to Dubai and from today we’ll have a Fly Dubai option connecting Dubai into Erbil, so that will certainly improve the transit times into Iraq.

“Bahrain Airport is slowly getting back to operational capacity, but at this point, I can’t put a date on when we will be uploading our flights from this hub again.”

DHL was looking at the capacity offered by Gulf Air flights from Bahrain into Europe that could return this week, Mr Dowling noted.

“Emirates is up to about 80% capacity and Qatar Airways and Fly Dubai and other carriers from the region are beginning to follow. 

“While we still have limited uplift, given the fact that international carriers are not returning into the Middle East and have no plans to do so anytime soon, I think the good news is that in the past week, we’ve seen an increase in capacity and flights, and, hopefully, with airports returning to normal operations, we’ll see faster transit times across the region,” Mr Dowling added.

Another speaker on the webinar was Patrick Bongers, DHL Global Forwarding’s global head of airfreight growth, who gave a more nuanced analysis of the air freight situation in the Gulf, including a graph showing how the main Gulf carriers – Emirates, Etihad Airways, Air Arabia, Qatar Airways, and Fly Dubai – had staged their gradual operational recovery last month.

“However, this recovery has stalled over the last couple of weeks,” he underlined.

Gulf airports are currently, on average, at only 51% of the air freight capacity they were using pre-crisis.

In contrast, at airports such as Jeddah and Muscat, capacity utilisation has soared by more than 100%, which has created ground handling pressures.

“But others remain severely impacted and the most prominent one here is Dubai’s cargo airport, DWC, which is still only operating at 38% of capacity.

“So recovery is ongoing, albeit at a slower pace,” Mr Bongers added.