How Trumps war on Iran stranded a million flyers — and plunged the Gulfs favorite playground into chaos

It was a little after 1PM on Friday, February 28th, and Samantha Lujano was about to board her flight from Dubai to Colombo, Sri Lanka, when the drone attacks began.

She had already received her boarding pass and gone through customs. Her flight was at the gate and her bags were loaded. She was simply waiting for the gate agents to open the flight for boarding. So she opened TikTok and started scrolling.

But instead of relieving her boredom, the algorithm fed her anxiety. It showed her dozens of videos of explosions that purported to be from around the Persian Gulf — including a few in Dubai itself. She knew better than to believe everything she saw on social media, and had heard nothing from official sources yet. For now, she kept calm.

Then her friends back home started texting her: “Did you see what happened? They just closed the airspace.”

She told them not to worry. After all, she was on the ground in Dubai and nothing seemed to be wrong. Then, in an instant, every single flight status on the airport’s departures monitor changed to blinking red.

“Canceled, canceled, canceled,” she recalled. “Everything was canceled.”

Dubai and the whole region had become a war zone. In response to a joint US and Israeli strike that morning, Iran had launched missiles and drones at targets across the Middle East, including Dubai. Most were intercepted by local defense systems. Even so, debris from intercepted drones caused damage across Dubai and injured four people.

By early afternoon, civilian airspace over the entire region was closed and more than 3,400 flights were canceled.

Lujano and many of her fellow passengers were now stuck. They no longer had valid visas to return to the UAE. They had no accommodations lined up. They had no choice but to wait in the departures area until someone in authority came up with a solution. And all the while, missiles and drones rained down overhead.

“We were really stranded,” she said.

Few places rely on air travel as much as the countries of the Persian Gulf. The 700 miles of coastline between Kuwait and Dubai contain seven major international airports that together receive more than 220 million passengers a year. The vast majority are international travelers, carried here by state-owned airlines including Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar Airways.

This was no accident, according to Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute and codirector of the Middle East Energy Roundtable. Beginning in the early 2000s, Gulf Coast countries invested billions into expanding airport capacity and growing their airline networks.

“They relied on infrastructure and technological advances to become these critical nodes on the 21st-century aviation map,” he told The Verge. “They saw that you could now connect any two points in the world with a stop in the Gulf, with the rise of these ultra-long-haul aircraft.”

The Gulf had two more advantages as a central aviation hub. One was geographical: It was already located less than an eight-hour flight from 80 percent of the world’s population. The other was environmental: Gulf airport developers did not have to deal with environmental regulations like their American and European counterparts did. (London Heathrow, for example, has been attempting to add a third runway since 2009; it only got approval to expand in November 2025.)

Since then, Gulf airports have steadily taken share away from the rest of the world’s airport hubs. The tipping point came in 2015, when Dubai overtook London Heathrow as the world’s busiest airport for international travelers. A coalition of American, Canadian, and European airlines all warned that they were rapidly losing ground to their Gulf Coast competitors.

The rest of the world’s loss was the Gulf’s gain, especially in the UAE. Forty years ago, it was an oil-dependent petrostate. Today, its aviation industry contributes more to its GDP than oil. With more travel comes more economic diversification, including many of the flashier industries now associated with the country: real estate, diamonds, cryptocurrency, and, most of all, social media.

Others in the region are attempting to follow the UAE’s lead. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and Iraq have committed more than $150 billion to build six new international airports that will rival Dubai’s airport in size. According to Airports Council International, the Middle East will become the world’s fastest-growing aviation region this year, surpassing Latin America and Africa.

But growth depends on one thing: peaceful skies. That held for the past 20 years thanks in part to a significant American military presence in the region, and an unofficial agreement to spare civilian targets in case of an actual conflict.

But that agreement ended on Friday, February 28th, when America and Israel attacked, and Iranian leaders instituted their “mosaic strategy” of retaliation. For the first time, Iran launched attacks at economic as well as military targets, including airports.

To date, the attacks have disrupted almost 20,000 total flights that have stranded nearly a million people. Every strike that was captured on video and every expat who posted a reaction on social media caused a different kind of damage to Dubai and its neighbors. They permanently shattered the region’s image as the only place to go if you wanted to feel untouchable.

Natalia Izak and Tomasz Brozio, both from Poland, had come to Qatar to experience that feeling. They were sunbathing on Doha’s West Bay Beach when the government broadcast its first emergency alert.

“Every single phone at the beach started ringing,” Izak recalled. “Then we got a second alert and a third one.”

“After the third one there was an explosion,” said Brozio.

They took an Uber back to their hotel and exchanged contact information with their driver just in case.

After three frustrating hours on hold with Qatar Airways and a trip to the customer service desk at the airport, they received a voucher to extend their hotel stay. But no one knew when they would be able to leave.

“We didn’t want to stay in this situation,” said Izak. “We wanted to get out on our own.”

After two days they called their Uber driver. He said that in the morning he could get them to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where at least some international flights were still operating. He would arrange their visas, drive them to the border, and have his cousin take them the rest of the way to Riyadh.

They successfully crossed the border and arrived in Riyadh just before midnight, well in advance of their scheduled flight back to Poland at 6AM the next day. But another wave of attacks closed Riyadh’s airspace temporarily.

After a 12-hour wait, they were able to leave — almost three days after their original departure date. Despite their ordeal, they’d consider traveling to the Middle East again. But they would prefer to wait until the threat of war recedes.

“To be honest we would like to come back,” said Brozio. “We really enjoyed Qatar.”

Not everyone has been so lucky. As of this writing, Samantha Lujano is still in Dubai after eight days. Still, she says she has little to complain about. Within hours of her flight’s cancellation, the government’s Tourism Office issued her an emergency visa and gave her a free hotel room for as long as she needed it.

“I feel grateful to be in this situation in Dubai,” she said. “It’s the safest place to be.”

Dubai’s airport is running at about half capacity now, although other airports remain functionally closed. The day before the conflict started, Qatar Airways operated 583 flights out of Doha. Today, it plans to operate just 16.

The disruption is already eating into the Gulf’s image as an international playground. High-end sushi restaurants have stopped receiving shipments of Japanese fish. Formula 1 may postpone two upcoming races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, since teams cannot fly their equipment to the race sites. And hotels are largely empty, with average occupancy rates dropping as low as 20 percent.

No one knows whether the war will conclude tomorrow or in a month. But it is clear that one of the busiest air corridors in the world will remain effectively closed until it does.