How did air cargo keep moving during the war?

Yes — the regional disruptions didn’t stop air freight from moving, but it did redirect it — prioritizing urgency, avoiding exposed Gulf hubs, and using every lever available to keep critical cargo moving.

Was it a full standstill? Not quite. “The war did not completely stop MENA air cargo — what it did was temporarily break the normal Gulf hub-and-spoke model,” Wouter Dewulf, professor of Air Transport Management and Economics at the University of Antwerp, tells EnterpriseAM.

The region moved from an optimized network to an emergency triage model — prioritizing critical cargo, rerouting what can still move, holding or deferring lower-priority cargo, and using secondary gateways, plus trucking, sea-air, and landbridge options, to complete the last leg, Dewulf adds.

The data backs the break: Global air cargo demand fell 4.8% y-o-y in March, with capacity down 4.7%, but the shock was concentrated in the Middle East. Regional carriers saw demand collapse 54.3% and capacity fall 52.4% — the weakest performance globally — while exposed Europe–Middle East and Middle East–Asia lanes dropped 57.6% and 58.6%.

Priority first, everything else waits

Cargo quickly became a hierarchy: “Everything — from pharma to military lift and humanitarian aid — as well as any type of premium contract freight had the priority,” Guillermo Ochovo, director at Cargo Facts Consulting, tells EnterpriseAM.

The pressure point was cargo dependent on Gulf transfer reliability. “Most at risk of being stranded were shipments already inside disrupted Gulf hubs, low-yield general cargo, non-urgent e-commerce, perishables without priority status, and any freight requiring a reliable connection through Dubai, Doha, or Abu Dhabi,” Dewulf says.

The vulnerability sits within the system itself — more than one-fifth of global air cargo flows are exposed to Middle East disruption, with over 10% directly reliant on the region’s hubs for transfer. The exposure is even sharper on Europe-Asia lanes, where roughly 30% to over 50% of flows depend on the region as a transit spine, Dewulf adds.

Freighters first, bypasses second

Freighters recovered before passenger aircraft: By the second week of March, cargo planes were back in motion while passenger fleets lagged, Ochovo says.

Europe stepped around the disruption, not into it: Asia-Europe capacity rose 38% as carriers bypassed the Middle East. The shift was tactical, not structural, Dewulf argues — while narrow-body belly capacity offered only a limited, temporary fix.

Narrow-body belly capacity filled some gaps — but only temporarily, and only for smaller loads.

No hub, no problem

Resilience favored those who could reconfigure the map in real time. “The most effective operators were not necessarily the largest airlines in normal times, but those with the most routing flexibility,” Dewulf notes, pointing to global forwarders, integrators, pharma logistics specialists, and freighter operators with access to alternative gateways.

Because the fix wasn’t just in the air: “Kuehne+Nagel, Marken, DHL, GEODIS, and others stood out because they could stitch together air, road, ocean, and customs solutions instead of relying on a single hub. Flights shifted into Jeddah, Riyadh, and Oman, with cargo moving onward by land,” he explains.

No single hub replaced the Gulf giants. Instead, the system fragmented: airlift into secondary gateways like Jeddah, Riyadh, Muscat, and Istanbul, followed by bonded trucking into the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and beyond. Cargo kept moving — just not the way it used to.

The rerouting map

The new cargo map? The crisis expanded the geography of air cargo — with the Asia to Europe freighter capacity rising by almost 21.5% in March — a sign that volumes once funneled through the Middle East are now surfacing across Central Asia.

Istanbul held its role — but the shift spread far beyond a single hub. “Istanbul is an exception because a lot was rerouted through it, but other hubs that saw significant gains in capacity and traffic included Baku, Tbilisi, Tashkent, Almaty, and Astana,” Ochovo adds.

The rerouting showed up in the numbers: Europe-Asia cargo volumes rose 14.2%, Africa-Asia climbed 22.6%, and Asia-Pacific carriers still posted 5.4% demand growth.

Backup hubs step in

Oman’s role shifted fast — largely because it sat outside the most disrupted Gulf triangle, with the Sultanate seeing its throughput climb 160-170% of previous traffic levels.

Saudi Arabia’s gateways proved comparatively steady: Riyadh and Jeddah retained 70%-80% capacity, while others dropped sharply: Doha to around 10%, Dubai to 35%, Abu Dhabi to just under 30%, with Bahrain and Kuwait trailing further behind.

Still, these were shock absorbers — not replacements. “They absorbed emergency flows — they didn’t replace Dubai, Doha, or Abu Dhabi,” Dewulf says, pointing to the Gulf’s deeply integrated cargo ecosystems.

Egypt’s role came down to timing and availability. As Gulf airspace tightened, Egypt remained largely untouched — “not affected at all,” Ochovo says — allowing capacity to climb 14% in March and a further 10% in early April.

That positioned Cairo as a secondary release valve, absorbing displaced cargo and offering a nearer alternative to longer diversions. It lacks the efficiency of the Gulf’s major hubs — but in a constrained network, available capacity made it a viable redistribution point and refuelling stop.

When fuel sets the limits

Fuel became the chokepoint: “It’s the constraint that can reshape the entire freighter market,” Ochovo notes, as parked aircraft rose 10%-11% from February to March — and kept climbing as marginal routes were cut.

Older, less efficient aircraft were hit hardest: “There are very old aircraft that are very inefficient to operate because they either use four engines or they use a lot of fuel,” he notes. Meanwhile, longer reroutings imposed payload penalties and forced additional stops through alternative hubs. The economics shifted accordingly: higher fuel costs fed into surcharges, but more importantly, into choice. With capacity constrained, carriers prioritized what was worth flying — and left lower-yield cargo behind.