TL;DR: Airline s just pushed their planned September return to Dubai and Riyadh back to late October, the second broken recovery date since the Middle East war began in February. The delay extends a capacity squeeze that has already pushed China-Europe air rates up 33%, and it's now colliding with a separate demand shift toward AI-linkedtrans-Pacific freight. Shippers who built Q3 and Q4 plans around a September capacity release need a new baseline.
Cathay Pacific said in early July it would resume daily passenger flights to Dubai and four-times-weekly flights to Riyadh on September1, joining Singapore Airlines, British Airways and Air Canada in signaling a return to the Gulf. That plan depended on the ceasefire between the US and Iran holding. It didn't. Within days of the announcement, hostilities resumed, and by July 18 Cathay had pushed both dates to late October: October 25 for Dubai, October 26 for Riyadh. It also quietly shelved its plan to restart freighter service to Riyadh, which had been due in August. Singapore Airlines, British Airways and Air Canada have all extended their own Dubai suspensions to October 24. All-cargo carrier Cargolux has done the same.
This is the second time in five months that a stated Gulf recovery date has failed to hold. The first was the ceasefire itself, agreed in April and formalized in a June memorandum that briefly reopened the region before collapsing under renewed strikes in early July. Shippers who treat October 25 as a hard date are repeating the same mistake twice.
One holdout is worth watching. KLM has not moved its own target of August 23 for Dubai, Riyadh and Dammam service, even as every other major carrier on this route has shifted to late October. Airlines flying the exact same corridor are reading the security situation differently, and that split view means no single carrier's published date should be treated as a market-wide signal right now.
The Middle East war removed 12% of global air cargo capacity overnight when it began on February 28, according to rate benchmarking platform Xeneta. About a third of Asia-Europe cargo used to move through Gulf hubs, much of it on Emirates, Qatar Airways and Etihad aircraft. When that capacity disappeared, the freight didn't disappear with it. It shifted onto direct Asia-Europe freighters and alternative Asian transshipment points, and that migration is the direct cause of the rate increases shippers have been absorbing since March.
China-to-Europe air rates stood at $3.41 per kilogram the day before the war began. As of mid-July they were at $4.52/kg, up 33%,according to Freightos data cited by the Journal of Commerce. Xeneta's broader read is similar: global air cargo rates, combining spot and contract pricing, rose 17% year over year in the first half of 2026, and the firm has revised its full-year forecast from an expected 5-10% decline to a 5-15% increase.
The detail worth sitting with: Xeneta describes spot rates as plateauing, not falling. That is a different signal than a temporary spike, which implies reversion once flights resume. A plateau means the market has settled at a new, higher baseline. Pushing the resumption date back by seven or eight weeks removes the near-term pressure that might otherwise have brought rates down.
The Gulf capacity gap isn't being absorbed in isolation. Trans-Pacific demand for data center and AI-related hardware is currently filling the equivalent of 46 freighters a day, and global semiconductor sales grew 106% year over year in April, the strongest growth since records began in 1986. AI-linked goods are still under10% of global air cargo volume, but they're heavily concentrated on the trans-Pacific corridor. That means wide-body freighters which might otherwise flex toward Asia-Europe to cover the Gulf short fallare increasingly tied up on a different, faster-growing lane.
At the same time, the demand that used to anchor air cargo growth is cooling. China's low-value and e-commerce exports fell 7% year over year in May, the sixth straight monthly decline, following the US elimination of its de minimis exemption in 2025 and the EU's removal of its own €150 duty-free threshold on July 1 this year. Xeneta's own view is blunt: the extraordinary e-commerce growth of the past several years is unlikely to return as a structural driver of air cargo demand.
Put together, capacity is reallocating toward AI-linked freight and away from the low-value e-commerce volume that used to fill belly-hold space, while the Gulf corridor stays constrained longer than planned. Shippers moving general cargo or mid-value goods on Asia-Europe lanes are now competing for space in a market prioritizing a different kind of freight.
Worth noting for anyone routing both air and ocean freight through the region: recovery speed has not been symmetric. Xeneta's own commentary makes the point directly, noting that air freight charters were back in operation within days of prior de-escalation, while ocean services are only just beginning to trickle back through the Strait of Hormuz. If your routing depends on both modes recovering on a similar timeline, that assumption doesn't hold up against how this conflict has actually played out.
Three adjustments are worth making before next quarter's bookings go out.
First, treat late October as the earliest realistic date for Gulf capacity relief, not the confirmed one. Given the back-and-forth pattern since April, a further slip into November is a real possibility, not a worst-case scenario.
Second, build rate assumptions around the post-February baseline rather than pre-war pricing. If your procurement team is still benchmarking quotes against 2025 rates, that comparison no longer reflects the market you're actually buying into.
Third, if your Asia-Europe freight has any routing flexibility, reduce dependence on capacity paths that assume Gulf hubs return on schedule. Direct Asia-Europe freighter service and alternative Asian transshipment points have already absorbed a third of the market's volume since February, and that shift is not reversing itself by October.
Source:https://www.joc.com/article/airlines-put-middle-east-return-on-hold-as-hostilities-resume-6255038
