Short History of Gulf Airlines

As promised, I will give a short description on the airlines here. There was only one combined-airline for the states of Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Oman until quite recently. The airline was known as Gulf Air – maybe some of you may have heard of it. One weird thing is that although Abu Dhabi and Dubai are in the same country (UAE), they operate different airlines. Dubai as I’ve said operates the Emirates Airline which is quite famous.

Some years back, Qatar decided to pull out of the Gulf Air consortium and formed Qatar Airways. (Called Al-Qatariyah) Qatar Airways is famous for its cheap air fare (in comparison to other Middle Eastern airlines). Thus Doha became a ‘budget’ transit hub in the Middle East. In fact almost everyone on Qatar Airways are merely transiting in Doha (hardly anyone checks out there!)

Soon, Oman decided to have its own airlines known as Oman Air. Don’t think this is a very popular airline. And about 3 – 4 years back, Abu Dhabi decided that it was time to have its own airline and thus Etihad was born. I guess Etihad means ‘victory’ as in Al-Ittihad. In the early years, Etihad was known for its bad service and lousy planes. But recently it has up-ed its standard and is on par with Emirates. In fact, I would say that Etihad was probably the best airline I’ve taken so far. Worst could have been Lufthansa! (Then again, my experience with airlines is quite limited)

While all the countries decided to have their own airlines, Bahrain was left with Gulf Air which, by then was bleeding and loosing money like anything! I think it still is loosing money.

And that was the history of middle eastern airlines or rather gulf airlines. On to UAE – there are 3 airlines as far as I could remember! Etihad belonging to Abu Dhabi, Emirates belonging to Dubai and there is a smaller one belonging to Sharjah (think it’s called Sharjah Airlines). This is probably some kind of budget airline since Sharjah is after all the proposed destination by Air Asia X!