British Airways passengers who are currently stranded in the Middle East after airspace across the region was suddenly shuttered on Saturday are now in a desperate scramble to secure seats on the first rescue flight that the airline is laying on back to London.
On Tuesday afternoon, the airline confirmed that it had been working with the Foreign Office to arrange the repatriation flight, which will depart in the early hours of Thursday morning from Muscat, Oman, where the airspace remains open.
Muscat is approximately four hours away from Dubai by road, and around five hours away from Abu Dhabi, where thousands of British Airways passengers have been stranded for days on end.
British Airways is, however, saying that this flight is primarily aimed at passengers who are already in Oman.
And while BA hasn’t flown a regularly scheduled service to Muscat since early 2020, some passengers have told the airline that they have relocated to Oman in an attempt to find a commercial flight back home.
“We continue to closely monitor the situation in the Middle East,” the airline said in a statement. “A number of our customers have told us they’re in Oman, where the airspace is currently open. Working with the relevant authorities, we’ve been able to schedule a flight for those customers to travel from Muscat to London.”
The statement continued: “We expect there to be significant interest, and therefore we will assign seats on a first-come, first-served basis.”
The flight is expected to depart Muscat International Airport at 2:30 am on March 5, although further details, such as the aircraft type, have yet to be loaded into booking systems.
British Airways is keen to avoid stranded passengers from traveling to Oman just to get on this flight. The service is explicitly for customers who are already in Oman, and passengers still in the United Arab Emirates are being encouraged to follow official Foreign Office travel advice.
The Foreign Office had been exploring whether it should charter flights to evacuate stranded citizens out of the Middle East, although given the sheer scale of the operation, there is doubt whether any government-funded repatriation effort will go ahead.
In the meantime, the UAE has opened what it calls ‘safe air corridors’ out of the country, capable of handling around 48 flights per hour – a fraction of the normal air traffic that would traverse the country.
Emirates and Etihad Airways have been running a small number of repatriation flights since yesterday afternoon, although passengers are being warned not to even attempt to travel to the airport unless they have been contacted directly and confirmed on a departing flight.
The situation is trickier elsewhere in the region. Flights out of Doha and Bahrain remain completely suspended, with some stranded travelers resorting to driving across the Saudi Arabian desert in an attempt to catch flights home from Riyadh.
