Khalaf Al-Harbi

Okaz

A week ago, a sandstorm blanketed many Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) cities. Even though the sandstorm has subsided, it has become apparent that there is still some dust that is hiding the reality of what happened at airports in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam on Thursday, April 2.



I waited for statements to be released by Saudi Arabian Airlines and the General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA) but all I could see were apologies for the cancelation of hundreds of flights in a single day. There were no clarifications except that dust was to blame for the cancelations and subsequent stranding of a huge number of passengers.



Well, I want to share with readers a simple story about what happened to passengers on that Thursday. I was taking a work trip from Kuwait to Dubai and I had another scheduled trip from Dubai to another destination together with one of my friends who was supposed to fly into Dubai from Riyadh on the same day.



On the day I was supposed to catch my flight, there was little dust in Kuwait and Riyadh even though the sandstorm had hit both cities for a few days in a row. In Dubai, however, the sandstorm was raging but in the midst of the sandstorm that engulfed the city’s skyscrapers, my flight landed without any difficulties that are worth mentioning.



I did not notice any flight disruptions either in Kuwait or Dubai. As I made my way from the airport to the venue of my meeting, my driver kept talking about the sandstorm and told me that he had never witnessed a storm of such magnitude in Dubai before.



At the meeting hall, I waited for the friend who was flying in from Riyadh so we could attend the event and then take a flight together to attend another one. I received a call from him informing me that his flight to Dubai had been postponed for several hours due to the dust. I was surprised to hear this because of the fact that the sandstorm had almost subsided in Riyadh.



One hour after the sandstorm, chaos broke out at Riyadh airport due to number of flight cancelations. Many passengers who boarded the planes of Saudi Arabian Airlines were offloaded following the cancelations. Some flights even changed their routes. As passengers who were scheduled to travel on board Saudia flights were left stranded at Riyadh airport, other airlines operated their flights from the airport to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and other countries without any interruptions. It seems only our national carrier was affected by severe asthma and allergies due to the dust!



Can we say dust was the sole problem in creating all this mess? Is there anything wrong with the flight scheduling system or with Saudia leadership responsible for crisis management? In short, the events of last Thursday were shameful, and blaming dust for this is dodging responsibility. If the issue of cancelation of flights remains unanswered in an explicit way, there is no doubt that such things will be repeated again and again in the future.