The incredible rise of Dubai as the world's air travel hub

Sixty years ago Dubai was little more than a village. Pearling and fishing propped up the economy and around 25,000 called it home. To put that into perspective, more people attend Sunderland’s football matches on a typical Saturday afternoon.

The city’s airport was just a single runway on a salt flat. Alongside it was the only place to stay in the entire emirate, the Airlines Hotel.

Fast forward to the present and Dubai is a gleaming metropolis with more than three million residents, almost 200 skyscrapers taller than 150 metres, around 125,000 hotel rooms (and growing) – and even an indoor ski slope.

Its airport, meanwhile, now handles nearly 90 million travellers a year, including 89 million from abroad, making it the busiest in the world in terms of international traffic. And it’s about to get busier, with plans revealed this week to raise capacity to 120 million by spacing arrivals and departures more evenly across each day.

The staggering rise of Dubai as the world’s stopover capital began in 1960, when the first proper airport was built on the orders of Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum. Three years later an asphalt runway was added, as were new hangars and navigational aids, prompting the arrival of international airlines. The first jet aircraft to touch down on the new runway was a De Havilland Comet flown by Middle East Airlines, the flag carrier of Lebanon. A new terminal building, with the airport’s first duty-free shops, came in 1970, by which time nine airlines, including Kuwait Airways and BOAC, were operating flights to 20 destinations.

With oil money rolling in (black gold was discovered off Dubai in 1966), the city’s construction boom really took off. Between 1968 and 1975 Dubai’s population grew by over 300 per cent and further airport development in the 1970s culminated in the construction of a second runway. With tight rest restrictions on flying over Russian airspace, the likes of Air India, Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines arrived in the 1980s, attracted to the convenience of Dubai as a stopping point for journeys by Europe and Asia. Annual passenger numbers pushed through the three million mark for the first time in 1981; by the end of the decade they had risen to 4.56m.

Things really began to take off in the 1990s, however. In 1998 a new terminal was built to take advantage of a global boom in air travel. A third terminal was added a decade later. Passenger numbers soared during the period: to 9.7m in 1998, 12.3m in 2000, 22m in 2004 and 37.4m in 2008.

In addition to stopover traffic, the numbers were further bolstered by the invention of Dubai: the winter sun destination. In 1988 there were just 48 hotels with 4,764 rooms in the city. Resources were poured into building hundreds more, as well as theme parks, vast shopping malls, family-friendly tourist attractions – not to mention the first grass golf course in the Middle East. The United Arab Emirates as a whole welcomed only 630,000 overseas holidaymakers in 1990. By 2010 that rose to 7.4m (last year the figure was more than 16m).

Hotels are popping up everywhere in Dubai, with the number of rooms topping 100,000 in 2017 and tipped to reach 132,000 by the end of 2019 and 150,000 during 2020, when the city hosts the annual World Expo.

Knocking Heathrow from its perch

For years Heathrow was the busiest airport for international traffic, a claim proudly plastered on its promotional literature. But in 2014 it finally lost its crown. Now Dubai handles 13.5m more overseas passengers than its London rival – mind the gap.

There is, however, one fairly substantial crumb of comfort for those comparing the status of the UK’s airports to the new pretenders in the Middle East. Despite Dubai’s leapfrogging of Heathrow, the passenger numbers passing through London’s combined airports remain much higher: some 170 million a year.

But growth is slowing

Last year Dubai’s numbers increased by only one per cent, less than any of its major rivals. What gives?

One thing Dubai perhaps didn’t count on was the new breed of ultra-long-haul aircraft that are increasingly removing the need for a stopover when flying between Europe and Asia. Right up until the 1990s, two legs was the norm. Now, however, airlines fly direct. You can travel from the UK to any number of long-haul destinations without a stop: Bali, Hanoi, Tokyo, even, since 2018, the Australian city of Perth.

The A380 superjumbo is falling from favour too, meaning flights to and from Dubai are carrying fewer passengers, on average.

Its Middle Eastern rivals have also raised their game. Abu Dhabi built new terminals in 2005 and 2009, helping it handle 24.5m passengers in 2016. Qatar’s new Hamad International opened in 2014 and already welcomes more than 35.8m travellers each year.

Dubai’s aviation masterplan, furthermore, involves a brand new $32bn airport some 40 miles to the south. Al Maktoum International opened in 2010. It currently subsists on a light diet of cargo flights and charter services, with Wizz Air, Aeroflot, flydubai and TUI among the clutch of airlines to use it. When it is completed, however (2027 has been mooted), it will have a staggering maximum capacity of 260 million passengers. Should it manage to attract that many travellers – a big if – it will be, by some margin, the busiest airport in the world (counting both international and domestic traffic). Will it replace Europe as the key stopover for journeys between North America, the world’s largest aviation market, and Asia, the fastest growing? Will the aircraft of the future need a stopover, even on journeys halfway around the world? Watch this space.