From London: As Australians woke on Saturday morning, a war had already begun. Joint United States and Israeli strikes on Iran, launched in the early hours of 28 February, triggered a cascade of airspace closures that within hours had paralysed some of the world's busiest transit hubs and left an estimated 115,000 Australians stranded across the Middle East.
A wave of US and Israeli strikes on Iran, and retaliation by Tehran on targets across the region, forced much of the Middle East's airspace to shut down, with reverberations felt across the globe. At least eight states declared their airspace closed as the conflict erupted, including Iran, Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The practical consequences were immediate and severe.
More than 2,800 flights were cancelled on Sunday to and from airports across the Middle East, including those that remained open in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, according to figures on flight tracking site FlightAware. International airports in London, Mumbai, Delhi, Bangkok, Istanbul, Sri Lanka and Paris each reported dozens of cancellations as well. For Canberra, the implications are direct: Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi serve as the primary transit points for millions of Australians travelling to Europe each year.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong said around 115,000 Australians are currently in the Middle East region, and that the resumption of commercial flights would be the government's preferred method for repatriating them given the scale of the problem. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade upgraded its Smartraveller advisories to the highest level. DFAT now advises Australians not to travel to Bahrain, Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, and continues its longstanding advice against travel to Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Syria and Yemen.
The physical damage to Gulf infrastructure added a layer of complexity beyond mere airspace management. Two airports in the UAE reported strikes as the government condemned what it called a blatant Iranian ballistic missile attack, with Dubai International Airport reporting four people injured and Zayed International Airport in Abu Dhabi recording one fatality and seven injuries from a drone strike. Dubai authorities confirmed that debris from an aerial interception also caused a fire at one of the berths at Jebel Ali Port, the city's principal sea terminal and a critical node in global shipping networks.
More than 80% of flights scheduled to and from Dubai and more than half of those to and from Abu Dhabi remained cancelled as of early this week, according to flight tracking website FlightAware. Several international airlines cautiously resumed a small number of flights from the UAE on Monday and Tuesday, offering some relief for travellers. Dubai's government, however, told passengers to head to airports only if contacted directly by their carrier.
The crisis has also exposed the scale of global supply chain exposure to the Gulf. The Register reported that shipping and air cargo disruptions were already creating delays across the region, with analysts warning of broader knock-on effects if the conflict widens. Flexport, a supply chain optimiser, warned that air carriers based in the region represent 13.6% of global air freight capacity. Maersk suspended all new ocean bookings between the Indian subcontinent and the Upper Gulf markets, including the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Iraq and Kuwait. Shipping giant Hapag-Lloyd went further, introducing a war risk surcharge of $1,500 per standard container on bookings issued from 2 March. The International Maritime Organization urged all shipping companies to exercise maximum caution and avoid the affected region until conditions improved.
For Australian travellers using Gulf carriers to reach Europe, the choice of airline has determined the severity of disruption. For tickets issued on or before 1 March for travel between 1 and 3 March, Qantas offered fee-free refunds, credits or date changes on flights to, from or via the UAE, Qatar, Israel, Jordan and Oman, booked through Qantas on partner airlines. Qantas said there was no current impact to its own operated flights, including services between Singapore and London. Virgin Australia confirmed that seven Qatar-operated codeshares were cancelled on Sunday and five more on Monday.
The insurance dimension adds another concern for affected passengers. The Insurance Council of Australia has said most travel insurance policies exclude losses arising from war or armed conflict, and while some policies may cover limited cancellation costs if DFAT upgrades advice to "Do Not Travel" after a trip is booked, claims linked directly to conflict are typically excluded.
There are legitimate competing perspectives on both the conflict itself and the West's response to the regional fallout. Critics of the US-Israeli military campaign argue that striking Iranian territory without exhausting diplomatic options has produced precisely the chaotic escalation that regional security architecture was meant to prevent, at enormous cost to civilian travellers, workers and supply chains across South and Southeast Asia. Iranian state media, citing the Red Crescent, said at least 201 people had been killed and more than 700 injured across Iran by US and Israeli bombing, with Iranian state-run IRNA reporting that among the dead were more than 100 children killed when a girls' school was struck in the country's south. Those figures could not be independently verified, but they illustrate the human dimensions of the conflict that extend well beyond flight schedules.
Defenders of the military action point to Iran's own escalatory pattern, its retaliatory strikes against civilian infrastructure across multiple Gulf states, and the longstanding concern over its nuclear programme. Aviation consultant Linus Bauer told The National that if airspace avoidance persists, airlines face structurally higher operating costs, weaker aircraft utilisation and profit margin pressure, especially on long-haul networks reliant on Middle East transit corridors.
What this crisis reveals, with unusual clarity, is how deeply Australia's aviation connectivity depends on Gulf megahubs that were until last weekend considered models of stable, commercial neutrality. Experts say the disruption highlights Australia's reliance on Middle Eastern megahubs and the strategic value of forthcoming ultra-long-haul non-stop services to London and New York. President Trump has said the military campaign could last four to five weeks. Whether that timeline holds, the underlying lesson for Australian travellers, freight operators and policymakers is the same: connectivity built on a single regional corridor carries concentrated risk. Prudent planning, from DFAT registration to diversified routing, is not overcaution. It is sound preparation for a world that can change, quite literally, overnight.