The Gulf has a plan for bigger airports, but it still needs one for the skies between them

The Gulf is pouring bns into airports whose usable capacity depends on airspace no single government controls. Governments can approve runways, terminals, aircraft, and airline routes within their own borders, but expanding regional airspace takes coordination across them, Sindy Foster, principal managing partner at Avaero Capital Partners, tells EnterpriseAM.

The passenger targets are large: Dubai’s USD 35 bn expansion of Al Maktoum International Airport (DWC) is designed to accommodate 150 mn passengers a year in its first major phase, due in 2032, rising to 260 mn eventually. Saudi Arabia is targeting 330 mn passengers annually by 2030, more than double the 140.9 mn it recorded in 2025.

The pinch points are peak hours and borders: Gulf airspace hasn’t necessarily reached its overall limit, but pressure could build during peak hub traffic, at national boundaries, and along routes with few alternatives, which could leave airports unable to fully use their runway capacity at busy times, Foster says.

Some of that pressure is already here: Gulf airspace is already operating at capacity despite heavy investment in navigation technology, procedures, and traffic management across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman, Wouter Dewulf, professor of air transport management and economics at the University of Antwerp, tells us. Fast airport expansion is widening the gap between traffic volumes and airspace systems that are still largely organized country by country, he adds.

The squeeze is at the borders

The runway is one link in a longer chain: Every flight also needs departure and arrival routes through the airspace around the airport, then en-route corridors that often pass through a neighbor’s control center. Fixed flight paths, restricted flight levels, military airspace, and handovers between neighboring air-traffic-control systems can all cut into an airport’s effective capacity, Dewulf says. The result is a gap between the number of aircraft the runways could handle in theory and the number the wider system can handle reliably.

The chain is tightest where several hubs share it: Those interfaces matter more than any single border or flight corridor, Dewulf tells us. To the east, flights from Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and other UAE airports cross Omani airspace toward India, Pakistan, and wider Asia. To the west and northwest, traffic from hubs in the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain converges over Saudi airspace, which is also a growing corridor for flights toward Europe, Africa, and the Red Sea, he adds.

Dubai’s move to DWC adds a new link to an already busy stretch: The new airport’s expansion has to be coordinated with existing operations at Dubai International (DXB) during the transition, alongside traffic from Sharjah and Abu Dhabi and aircraft flying through UAE airspace, Dewulf says. “Designing that terminal and en-route airspace will be at least as important as building the runways,” he adds.

SOUND SMART- Terminal airspace is the controlled zone around an airport where aircraft climb out after takeoff and line up to land. En route airspace is the higher network of airways that carries them between regions.

Airlines pay for the gap

Airlines carry the cost, and investors carry the risk to their returns. Longer routings, inefficient handovers, and limits on available flight levels can raise fuel burn, crew costs, and flight times and cut aircraft utilization, Foster says. Airlines may have to build extra time into schedules, which can mean fewer productive flights per aircraft each day. Beyond the occasional delay, airspace inefficiency can weigh on returns from investment in airports, fleets, and route networks, she adds. Those returns depend partly on airspace the investors don’t control.

Gulf hubs make their money in tight connecting waves: Gulf carriers bunch long-haul arrivals and departures into tightly scheduled waves, creating sharp peaks in airspace demand even when daily traffic is manageable, Dewulf says. With less spare capacity at busy times, the system is more exposed to delays, weather, and airspace restrictions, and a five- or 10-minute disruption can ripple through connecting flights into the next departure wave, he adds.

Every reroute lands somewhere

Those ripples can cross borders, and the UAE has rules for when they do. An April aviation circular lets the Emirates Area Control Center temporarily stop departures from specified regional airports when arrival delays at a UAE airport hit 30 minutes and are expected to grow. If a long disruption uses up available holding capacity, controllers can refuse additional aircraft entry to UAE airspace and ask neighboring ATC centers to hold incoming traffic. These are contingency measures, designed for cases where a holdup at one airport spills into airspace across the border.

Wartime diversions tested the network, and neighbors absorbed the load. Egypt’s area control center handled more than double its regular traffic (some 226%) at the peak of the crisis as flights were diverted away from disrupted parts of the Middle East, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO) June 2026 regional air-navigation report (pdf). ICAO credited coordination between Egypt, neighboring states, and the agency’s regional contingency team with managing those flows safely.

Keeping airspace open didn’t shield Oman from the knock-on effects: Muscat’s flight-information region stayed operational through the crisis, but restrictions and uncertainty in neighboring airspace changed traffic patterns and routing requirements, bringing diversions, airborne holding, extra ATC coordination, and a heavier controller workload. In the UAE, authorities developed alternative routings and used traffic-flow and airspace-slot management to balance demand against available capacity.

Some restrictions are still in place: The European Union Aviation Safety Agency’s (EASA) September and October 2026 advisories still flag risks over Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and parts of the Gulf, with several bulletins valid until 16 November. They stop short of blanket airspace closures, but they feed into airline routing decisions that sit outside any airport operator’s control.

Alternative routes have their own limits: Controllers across the region have rerouted aircraft through disruptions, but alternative paths can become more congested, less efficient, and more expensive, Richard Maslen, head of analysis at CAPA – Center for Aviation, tells us. “A constraint in one location can push traffic into another already busy corridor, creating a domino effect across the region,” he adds.

Holding up under the next shock takes capacity planned in advance: Neighboring systems need the controller capacity, flight levels, and communications and surveillance infrastructure to take diverted aircraft on top of their normal traffic, Foster says. “The region needs contingency capacity planned as a network, including pre-agreed alternative routes and coordinated flow management, rather than relying on individual neighbouring states to absorb additional traffic at short notice,” she adds.

Toward one Gulf sky

The region has started building a shared regulator: GCC leaders approved a regional civil aviation authority, headquartered in the UAE, in December 2025, a month after officials reviewed an updated study on unified upper airspace across GCC states.

Traffic management could go regional while sovereignty stays national: A working regional framework could let controllers and planners organize traffic around flight flows more than national boundaries, which could improve routing efficiency, sector management, and the ability to respond to demand as it shifts, Maslen says. National sovereignty and military requirements would remain, so integration would improve how available airspace is managed without removing restrictions, he adds.