Until today, Israeli travelers heading east for business or pleasure had very few choices, a mere handful of flights to India, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Seoul, none of them operated on a daily basis even before the pandemic. Even worse, flights on Israeli aircraft had to waste hours’ worth of fuel and time detouring around Saudi airspace.
As I write, the game-changing first-ever commercial airline flight of an Israeli airliner to the United Arab Emirates, from Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport to Abu Dhabi, is about to take off, carrying a delegation of Israeli and American officials and presidential advisor Jared Kushner. The Boeing 737-900 aircraft chosen for the flight is equipped with Israel Aerospace Industries' Skyshield anti-missile system, unlike El Al’s Boeing 787 fleet, and was painted with the word “peace” in Hebrew, English, and Arabic.[i]
The flight plan filed indicates that it will be the first Israeli commercial flight permitted to overfly the airspace of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, itself a hugely important move.
Twitter screen grab
Once the pandemic eases and semi-normal airline traffic resumes, Israeli travelers will find travel not just to the UAE, but to the entire world east of it, much more convenient and almost certainly much cheaper. Abu Dhabi and Dubai airports are both gigantic airline hubs (Dubai was the biggest pre-covid international airline hub in the world), where millions of passengers a month changed planes on their way to hundreds of destinations served by the flag carriers Emirates and FlyDubai, based in Dubai, and Etihad, based in Abu Dhabi. Once normal travel resumes, Israeli passengers almost certainly will have the choice of multiple departures per day