Lebanon's MEA airline says priority is to connect Beirut to the world amid Israeli shelling

Flag carrier's chairman says he is 'proud' of his pilot son who has chosen to continue flying

Lebanese Middle East Airlines planes are seen at Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport in Lebanon. Reuters

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Lebanon's flag carrier Middle East Airlines is taking a “calculated risk” as the only commercial carrier still operating out of Beirut airport amid intensified Israeli attacks.

“Our top priority is to continue serving Lebanon and to keep Beirut International Airport connected to the world … we are doing that,” Mohamad El Hout, chairman of Middle East Airlines, said at a panel during the Arab Air Carriers Organisation 57th annual general meeting on Thursday in Jordan.

“We want to make sure we are doing it without risking the life of our crew, our passengers and our staff – this is our top priority.”

The chairman's son, Abdul Rahman, is a pilot with MEA and continues to fly commercial aircraft even as Israel strikes areas next to Lebanon's only airport.

“I didn't ask him to fly, he took his decision, and he knows that management makes the right risk assessment. We are taking a risk for sure, but it's a calculated risk. Many times he flew during bombs [on] many nights,” Mr El Hout said.

“This has helped his colleagues to come to work without hesitation because they see that the son of the chairman is flying like everybody else. So I'm proud of him.”

Mr El Hout said the current circumstances require vigilance.

“Really in this situation … you need to be alert all the time, you need to be awake all the time. You need to wait for every aircraft and make sure that it has come back safely to Beirut or left Beirut safely,” he said.

The escalating conflict in the Middle East dominated discussions by Arab airlines' chiefs who held their annual meeting this week in Jordan under the shadow of the year-long Gaza war and Israeli attacks on Lebanon.

The gathering of the Arab airlines' chiefs at the Dead Sea on Tuesday and Wednesday came days after Israel’s military launched an attack against Iran on Saturday morning. Flights were disrupted after explosions were heard across Tehran in what the Israeli military described as “precise strikes on military targets”. Responding to the situation, several airlines in the region rerouted flights.

The location for the AACO meeting at Jordan's Dead Sea region served as a poignant backdrop for the discussions amid the Gaza war, with the salt lake sitting between Jordan and Israel.

Re-routing flights to avoid closed or dangerous airspace can add up to 30 minutes to flights and increase cost by about 10 per cent, Samer Al Majali, vice chairman and chief executive of Royal Jordanian and chairman of AACO's 57th annual meeting, said.

Outside borders

After Gaza and Lebanon, Jordan is the third worst-hit economy due to the war as tourist arrivals to the country have fallen, he said.

“Unfortunately people look at this region as one homogenous unit. Today we are sitting overlooking the West Bank, we are 30km from Palestine, and thank God things are OK. It's very difficult to convince people all over the world that this region is not a single unit,” Mr Al Majali said.

“We encourage people to come and go.”

EgyptAir recorded a 10 to 15 per cent drop in revenue in the first quarter of its fiscal year, which runs from July to June, due to flight disruptions in response to the conflict, Yehia Zakaria, EgyptAir Holding's chairman and chief executive, told The National on the sidelines of the AACO meeting. However, the comparison is not exact because the Hajj season occurred in July this year, he said.

“It's been one year now and the impact is increasing, it is not going down,” he said, as the airline temporarily suspended some flights to Baghdad, Erbil, Beirut and Amman before resuming services.

However, it has been mitigating these disruptions by redeploying some of its aircraft to increase frequencies in other destinations, mainly in Africa, such as Mogadishu and Djibouti, he said.

The airline is also working to grow ancillary revenue to compensate for these disruptions, Mr Zakaria said.

Meanwhile, Beirut-based AACO said it has continued working despite the conflict.

“We have prepared this AGM while we've been hearing every night bombs and so on. For us, we focus on what we need to do, not on what we fear, otherwise you can't do anything in your life,” Abdul Wahab Teffaha, secretary general of the AACO, said.

“The office never closed and it won't ever … Luckily we're all OK, we're all fine, we're all sane, which is the most important thing. We are managing. This episode is of course extremely stressful for anyone who is living in such an environment where buildings are being destroyed, people are dying and so on.

“But we need to carry on doing what we are doing to the best of our ability because if we don't do that, we will surrender to the atmosphere of despair. That we cannot do.”