Air India Express, after months of detours and suspensions triggered by drone and missile salvos over Iran, is tiptoeing back into West Asia with a handful of carefully chosen routes that are less about tourism and more about reconnecting India’s labour and remittance lifelines.
From 2–4 July, the pattern emerges. Kozhikode-Salalah in Oman is back twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, after being cut during the worst of the airspace closures. Kozhikode-Kuwait restarts on 3 July with one weekly rotation before ramping up to three flights a week from 5 July. Bengaluru-Kuwait follows on 4 July, also starting as a weekly service before stepping up to three weekly flights from around 7 July. With those three city pairs in place and additional Gulf links like Muscat-Mangaluru resuming around the same time, Air India Express says its entire West Asia network is once again live.
The choice of routes tells you what matters most to India in this corridor. Kozhikode is one of the classic Gulf gateways for the Malabar coast, home to a huge expatriate population that works in Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Salalah, in southern Oman, isn’t just a tourist city. It’s a base for construction workers, port staff and service sector employees from Kerala and neighbouring states. Kuwait, meanwhile, is an oil and services economy with tens of thousands of Indian workers whose trips home and back are scheduled around school calendars, contract cycles and family obligations. The first 'restored' flights are not aimed at holidaymakers; they are aimed at people whose earnings cross the Arabian Sea every month as remittances.
Behind the scenes, this reopening sits on top of weeks of war‑risk management. When missile and drone exchanges between Iran‑backed forces and the US‑Israeli coalition escalated in February and March, airspace closures and advisories forced Indian carriers to suspend or reroute many Gulf flights. IndiGo, for example, cut most Middle East services for days and later tiptoed back with a limited set of nine destinations, using longer routings via the Arabian Sea and Red Sea that added up to 90 minutes of flying time and more fuel burn.
Restarting now means a few concrete things have changed. Overflight paths that had been closed or heavily restricted have reopened enough to allow reasonably direct routings without skirting every hot spot. War‑risk insurers, who had raised premiums and tightened conditions when missiles started flying over the Gulf and Pakistan, are once again willing to cover scheduled operations on these tracks at prices that make sense for a low‑cost carrier.
The booking engine shows flights again, the terminal monitors in Kozhikode and Bengaluru list Salalah and Kuwait, and WhatsApp groups fill up with images of the first restored departures.
Gulf routes are not just lines on a map. They are arteries in India’s economic system. Millions of Indian workers in West Asia send money home every month, supporting families, paying for education and building houses. When flights to places like Salalah and Kuwait stop, it’s not only mobility that suffers. It shows how Indian carriers manage war‑risk in a world where conflict in one region can instantly test aviation networks thousands of kilometres away. It shows how, after weeks of missiles crossing key corridors, the first signs of normalisation come not from speeches but from a twice‑weekly flight to Salalah and three weekly runs to Kuwait.
The Gulf is not optional. It is a core part of the country’s aviation and economic story.