Gitu Ramani-Ruff was thrilled to be on board a flight from Dubai back home to New York on Thursday after she, her husband and their two sons were stuck in the United Arab Emirates last weekend on their way to visit family in India.
But before the plane took off, Ms. Ramani-Ruff felt a pang of fear and sent a text to her sister: “In the event something happens to us or the plane,” she started, before describing where she and her husband kept their will. “Make sure our pets have a long and loving life,” she wrote.
The plane landed safely at Kennedy Airport on Thursday, the first regularly scheduled Emirates flight to arrive in the United States since the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran began last Saturday.
Ms. Ramani-Ruff, 55, said she never feared for her life while watching explosions in the sky over Dubai. “It was really only when we found out that this was the first flight to the States. That was when I started getting nervous,” she said.
An explosion on a concourse at Dubai International Airport injured four people on Sunday. In Abu Dhabi, debris from a drone that targeted Zayed International Airport killed one person and injured seven more last weekend. Since the start of the conflict, about 30,000 flights have been canceled across the Middle East, according to Cirium, an aviation data firm.
But even as Iranian missiles and drones continued to threaten the Emirates on Friday, commercial flights were slowly resuming, including at Dubai International, one of the world’s busiest airports. Nearly 160 flights departed from Dubai on Friday.
Michael McCormick, a professor of air traffic management at Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University who worked with the U.S. military to run air traffic control in Iraq in the 2000s, said the danger to passengers flying in and out of the region was “fairly remote.” Satellites that track incoming missiles, along with air defense systems to shoot them down, give air traffic controllers plenty of warning to stop departures and turn back inbound traffic, he said.
While airports are large targets for potential attacks, individual planes are generally too small and fast moving to be targeted by the types of missiles and drones used so far in this conflict, especially over a long distance, Mr. McCormick said. In addition, the airspace where those projectiles are flying remains closed to prevent an accidental hit.
“The greater risk would be something hitting the terminal building while people were inside, versus something actually hitting an aircraft,” he said.
The United Arab Emirates’ General Civil Aviation Authority did not respond to a request for comment.
Philip Pitt, a spokesman for Etihad Airways, which is based in Abu Dhabi, said the airline was operating limited flights “following extensive safety and security assessments” and only “once all safety criteria are met,” though he did not answer specific questions.
An air traffic specialist in the Emirates, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said passengers were “as safe as can be” in Emirati airspace.
Commercial aircraft in the Emirates are operating only in airspace that the Emirati military has determined to be safe, he said, hugging the country’s borders with Saudi Arabia and Oman rather than flying over the Persian Gulf, where they could be at risk of an attack.
“If it’s not safe, you’re not going to fly,” he said.
He added that Iran and Israel were both known to interfere with GPS signals in the region by jamming and spoofing, which can affect pilots’ awareness of where they are in space. But aviation officials in the Emirates have handled signal manipulations with growing frequency over the last year, he said, and recently underwent training to brush up on how to help an aircraft being targeted.
Jodie Briggs, a writer from Brooklyn who was visiting her boyfriend in Dubai, made it out on an Emirates flight to Athens on Friday after having three other flights canceled this week.
In a phone interview while she waited in Athens to board a connecting flight to New York, Ms. Briggs said there was “no reference at all” to the ongoing conflict as she made her way through the Dubai airport and onto her first flight. “It was all smiles,” she said.
Still, after watching the first volley of missiles shot down over Dubai on Saturday, it took more than smiles to quell her anxiety.
“I watched the map channel the entire flight,” she said. “It was only after we got out of the Middle East that I could relax enough to take a nap. Best sleep I’ve had in six days.”
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Gabe Castro-Root is a travel reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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