Passengers on board a Virgin Atlantic flight from London Heathrow to Dubai finally returned to the UK after a 16-hour “flight to nowhere”.
Thousands of people have been left stranded at airports across the Middle East in the past week, after Iranian strikes targeted the Gulf states in response to a joint Israel-US bombing campaign.
Flights were briefly suspended on Saturday morning and passengers were taken into tunnels at Dubai airport, which is normally the busiest global hub in the world, following fresh drone strikes in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) city.
Flight VS400 had taken off from Heathrow at 10.22pm on Friday night for the seven-hour flight to Dubai. But after six hours in the air, while the Airbus A350 was flying over eastern Saudi Arabia, airspace was closed due to the latest attack.
The pilots turned around to fly back to London, but they landed at Budapest at 11am on Saturday to refuel. After 90 minutes on the ground, the aircraft took off again for a two-hour flight to Heathrow and landed shortly before 2pm.
A Virgin Atlantic spokesperson said: “The safety and security of our customers and our people is always our top priority.
“We have strict criteria that must be met for a flight to continue into the region, and even though Dubai airport reopened shortly after its closure, our criteria for proceeding had not yet been met.”
Hundreds of passengers who were waiting in Dubai to be flown back to London are having to wait for another opportunity to leave.
The Virgin Atlantic spokesperson said: “We’d like to thank our customers for their patience and understanding and will contact affected customers.
“Our flights have been repatriating as many of our customers and people who were in Dubai and Riyadh as possible, and we will continue our remaining rotations if deemed safe to do so.”
Virgin Atlantic has now decided to cancel all flights to and from Dubai for the rest of the winter season, apart from a single round-trip departing on Monday and returning the following day.
The airline’s spokesperson said: “Following airport and airspace closures in Dubai early this morning, we made the decision to cancel a number of our London Heathrow and Dubai rotations – the VS400 on Friday 6 March, VS401 on Saturday 7 March, VS400 on Saturday 7 March and VS401 Sunday 8 March.
“We continue to monitor the situation in the Middle East with ongoing dynamic assessments and active changes to our flight routings based on the latest information and guidance, where required.”
The relatively new Virgin Atlantic link between London Heathrow and Riyadh has also been “paused”.
Each airline makes its own risk assessment and has specific criteria for deciding whether or not to operate a flight.
British Airways, which is known for being particularly risk-averse, has decided to concentrate its efforts on flights to and from Muscat in Oman, which is regarded as a safe airport.
The three giant airlines of the Gulf – Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways – are all seeking to increase the number of repatriation flights from the region, particularly to the UK and India. Thousands of passengers are seeking to leave for these key long-haul destinations.
But other carriers are reducing their prospective flying programmes to the region, not least because of a collapse in demand and significantly higher operating costs, especially insurance.
Insurers are demanding much higher premiums as civilian airports come under attack from Iran.
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