Airport attacks put aviation in crosshairs of geopolitical conflicts

Surveillance footage shows people reacting amid smoke at the moment of an attack at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, October 10, 2026, in this frame from a handout video.Saudi Ministry of Media | ReutersDeadly attacks on Saudi Arabia's second-busiest airport over the past week are highlighting how conflicts in the Middle East are upending air travel on a larger scale.Aviation is increasingly in the middle of these sprawling clashes as threats and outright attacks have forced airlines to quickly cancel flights throughout the Middle East for days, weeks and, in some cases, months. Some carriers might redeploy planes that would be going to some Middle East destinations like Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Doha, Qatar, to other locations altogether."It's a new paradigm. Civil aviation is being directly targeted and it has not been the case in the last couple of decades," said Mark Zee, founder of OpsGroup, an independent aviation safety group whose members include pilots, dispatchers, airline employees and others. The Saudi airport attacks, claimed by Yemen's Iran-backed Houthis, were the deadliest in the country in more than a decade. Over the weekend, at le...