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The Gulf's hub airports made long-distance travel cheaper - but now their future looks unclear.
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Yet today, Dubai is one of the key pillars of the industry, and Dubai International Airport (DXB) is its beating heart. In 2024, more than 92 million passengers made their way through its gleaming, marble-floored halls and sparkling, brightly lit shopping malls.
That makes DXB the busiest airport in the world for international passengers - far outstripping London Heathrow, for example, which accommodated just under 83 million. Nor is Dubai alone within the Gulf as a major hub. Rival airports in Abu Dhabi and the Qatari capital, Doha, are not quite as busy, but they still handled some 87 million passengers between them.
Under normal circumstances, these three Gulf airports together handle more than 3,000 flights every day, the majority of them operated by the local carriers, Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways.
But the conflict in the Middle East has had a dramatic impact on global aviation. First, there was the paralysis of flights through some of the busiest airspace in the world, leaving aircraft at major hub airports grounded and hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded. Air traffic in the region remains heavily disrupted.
Then there is fuel. With supplies from refineries in the Gulf choked off after Iran effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz, it has become a serious concern. The region normally accounts for about half of Europe's jet fuel imports, and fears of scarcity have caused prices to double since the start of the conflict. Some carriers have already begun cutting flights in response.
But while these issues are likely to dominate the industry's thinking in the short-term - and will probably lead to higher prices in the months to come - there's also a question mark over what the longer-term implications will be.
In particular, insiders are a
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