Flight cancellations at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport rose sharply on Thursday as airlines dealt with challenges surrounding attacks on Saudi aviation facilities.

Flight-tracking platform Flightradar24 showed 153 cancelled departures, representing 39 per cent of scheduled services, as of 4pm Saudi time (5pm UAE time). A further 111 flights, or 28 per cent, were listed as delayed.

However, the situation continued to evolve rapidly. By 4.40pm Saudi time, the number of cancelled flights had climbed to 162, with the figure still rising at the time of writing.

The figures marked a rapid change from earlier in the day, when only 20 cancellations had been recorded shortly before midday.

The disruption has affected domestic and international routes, with services to Dubai, Istanbul, Doha, Muscat and several Saudi cities among those cancelled.

Affected flights included Saudia’s SV554 and SV560 services to Dubai, Turkish Airlines’ TK143 to Istanbul, Qatar Airways’ QR1165 to Doha and Oman Air’s WY684 to Muscat.

Several domestic services to Jeddah and Dammam were also cancelled, according to Flightradar24 data.

Some flights continued operating, although behind schedule. Flydubai’s FZ842 service to Dubai, scheduled to depart at 1.15pm, took off at 2.48pm.

The disruption follows attacks on King Khalid International Airport and Abha International Airport on October 6 and 7, which killed three people and injured 36 others, according to Saudi Arabia’s General Authority of Civil Aviation.

Read more: Three killed, 36 injured in Saudi airport attacks

Yemen’s Houthis claimed another ballistic missile attack on Riyadh airport on Thursday, although Saudi authorities had not immediately confirmed the latest claim.

The UAE has condemned the attacks, reaffirming its solidarity with Saudi Arabia and its support for measures to safeguard the kingdom’s security and stability.

Budget airline Wizz Air has abandoned plans to restart flights to Abu Dhabi and Dubai this winter, just a month after announcing its return to the UAE market — and a year after shutting its locally based operations.

The airline has cancelled all services to and from both emirates scheduled between October 25 and March 27, saying regional airspace restrictions have driven up flight times and operating costs.

In a statement, Wizz Air said restrictions extended on September 30 would require significantly longer routes, making operations using its Airbus A321neo and A321XLR aircraft “commercially unviable under current conditions”.

The decision comes just three days after the airline postponed six planned Abu Dhabi routes until January 10, 2027, citing European aviation guidance and restrictions on Iraqi airspace.

In September, Wizz Air had announced a return to the UAE with eight routes connecting Abu Dhabi and Dubai to six European cities, offering 32 weekly flights from October 25.

The services formed part of a wider Middle East comeback involving 49 weekly flights to the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

The latest cancellation follows an exit from the UAE last year.

Wizz Air Abu Dhabi, a joint venture with Abu Dhabi’s ADQ, ceased locally based operations on September 1, 2025, citing engine reliability problems, geopolitical instability and difficulties accessing certain markets.

That closure came despite the airline carrying more than 3.5 million passengers in 2024, an increase of more than 20 per cent year on year.

The latest planned services were to be operated from Wizz Air’s European bases, rather than through a revived Abu Dhabi subsidiary.

The airline said it would continue monitoring regional developments and reassess operations as safety guidance and commercial conditions evolve.

Ask most business leaders who makes money from health and the answer is hospitals, insurers and pharma. The numbers suggest that view is out of date. Health spending has moved out of the clinic and into retail, hospitality, property, finance and tech.

The global wellness economy reached $6.8tn in 2024, according to the Global Wellness Institute (GWI). That is double its 2013 size and larger than IT, tourism or sport. GWI projects it will reach $9.8tn by 2029, expanding 7.6 per cent a year. The fastest-moving sectors are not clinical ones: wellness real estate expanded 19.5 per cent a year between 2019 and 2024, and mental wellness 12.4 per cent.

The UAE is one of the sharpest examples. Its wellness economy is worth $40.8bn, equal to 7.6 per cent of national GDP, after expanding 14.3 per cent a year between 2019 and 2024, the fastest pace in the Middle East and North Africa. Wellness tourism alone reached $11.3bn, up 23.5 per cent a year, and GWI names prevention and personalised medicine among the UAE sectors expanding faster than anywhere else in the region.

Fads, trends and the gap between them

A market this size attracts noise. Every quarter brings a new supplement, tracker or longevity protocol, and business owners are left to work out which ones matter.

That is the question behind the second session of DQ Shift, the knowledge-sharing series from DQuarters, at Dubai Science Park on Wednesday 14 October.

Dr Craig Cook, CEO of The Brain & Performance Centre, a DP World company, will deliver the keynote, “The Future of Health & Wellness: What’s Coming and What It Means for Your Business”. A fireside chat follows, moderated by Gareth van Zyl, Group Editor of Gulf Business.

Dr Cook leads a Dubai centre focused on brain health, neurological rehabilitation and human performance, and previously served as Executive Director for International Operations at Cleveland Clinic. His session looks three to five years ahead, using global data to separate short-lived fads from the shifts reshaping the sector: personalised and preventive health, wellness built into everyday commerce, and technology that puts health data in consumers’ hands.

Six questions for the room

1. The conversation will work through questions that apply well beyond healthcare:
2. What changed to make health a business issue as well as a healthcare one?
3. Which shift are business leaders paying too little attention to?
4. If prevention is the future, where are the commercial opportunities?
5. Where will AI create the most value in health and wellness?
6. What one investment or capability does a business in tech, retail, hospitality or finance need now?
7. What will the best-run businesses be doing differently in five years?

Consumers are pulling the market forward. McKinsey’s Future of Wellness research values the consumer wellness market at $2tn, with Gen Z and millennials driving more than 41 per cent of US wellness spend while making up 36 per cent of adults. Early findings from its 2026 edition show 84 per cent of consumers now call wellness a top priority. On the technology side, MarketsandMarkets forecasts the AI in healthcare market will reach $110.6bn by 2030, from $21.7bn in 2025. For a retailer, a hotel group or a fintech, those figures describe customers they already have.

Why DQ Shift

DQ Shift runs on a simple premise: the most useful business insight comes from practitioners talking to peers. Sessions are short, held inside the communities where members work, and built to send people back to their desks with something they can use. The series opened at Dubai Media City with a panel on AI. Session two moves to Dubai Science Park, home to more than 6,500 life, energy and environment professionals.

The hour starts with 30 minutes of networking, so attendees meet the people working on these questions next door before the keynote begins. It is a morning to move your thinking forward.

• DQ Shift Session 2: Wednesday 14 October, 10.30am to 11.30am, Dubai Science Park. Places are limited. Register at https://www.dquarters.ae/dqshift.

UPDATE: Latest data from Flightradar24 shows that more than 150 flights have been cancelled on Thursday afternoon amid the disruptions from the attacks.

You can read our latest story by clicking here: More than 150 Riyadh airport flights cancelled following attacks

Flights at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport faced some disruption on Thursday, as airlines dealt with challenges from attacks on Saudi Arabian airports.

Flight-tracking platform Flightradar24 showed 114 delayed departures at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport as of 12.17pm Saudi time on Thursday, representing 29 per cent of scheduled services.

A further 20 flights, or 5 per cent, had been cancelled, while the average departure delay stood at 35 minutes.

Read more: Three killed, 36 injured in Saudi airport attacks

Thursday’s cancellations and delays affected domestic and international services.

Saudi Arabia’s General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA) confirmed on Wednesday that attacks on King Khalid International Airport and Abha International Airport on October 6 and 7 had killed three people and injured 36 others.

At Riyadh airport, a Sudanese resident was killed and eight people injured, including five Saudi citizens. The attack on Abha, in the kingdom’s south, killed two female residents of Moroccan and Algerian nationality and left 28 others injured.

Both incidents caused damage to airport facilities, according to the authority.

GACA said it was working with the relevant authorities to assess the damage, establish the safety of the facilities and take measures to protect passengers and airport staff.

Across the Gulf, the energy transition conversation is dominated by megawatts of new solar and wind capacity, grid interconnections, and national renewable targets. For instance, the UAE has set a 44 per cent clean energy target for 2050, while Saudi Arabia is targeting 50 per cent of electricity from renewables by 2030, and both countries have committed to achieving net zero by 2050 for the UAE and 2060 for the kingdom.

However, there is a quieter, faster lever sitting inside the region’s factories, water plants, and utilities that gets far less attention: the electric motor.
Motor-driven systems account for around a quarter of the world’s total electricity use, and close to 60 per cent of all the electricity industry consumes. They drive the pumps, fans, compressors and conveyors that keep industry, water networks and buildings running: largely invisible, but foundational to everything else.

Yet globally, only around a quarter of installed motors are paired with a variable speed drive, the technology that matches a motor’s speed and output to what a process actually needs, rather than running it flat-out regardless of demand. It is one of the most proven, fastest-payback efficiency upgrades in industrial engineering, and it remains dramatically under-deployed.

The UAE’s total electricity demand is already around 173 TWh a year and is projected to climb toward 225 TWh by 2040, driven by urbanisation, industrial expansion, and a fast-growing data centre and AI infrastructure sector, a segment whose power consumption in the UAE alone is expected to roughly double by 2030.

Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC are on similar trajectories, driven by data centres and the constant need for cooling in a hot climate, both of which now add steadily to the growing electricity demand every year.

Every gigawatt-hour of that growth that gets met with new power plants and new grid infrastructure is expensive and slow. It takes capital, years of construction, and puts extra strain on transmission networks. On the other hand, using existing equipment more efficiently is cheaper, faster, and can start today.

It is also the cleanest option: the IEA estimates that stepping up energy efficiency could deliver more than a third of the emissions cuts the world needs by 2030. That is the real argument for efficiency because even as the Gulf adds more clean power to the grid, demand is growing faster than that clean capacity can keep up, and efficiency is what makes the renewable energy targets achievable in the first place.

Independent estimates suggest that upgrading the world’s installed base of inefficient motor-driven systems to high-efficiency motors could cut global electricity consumption by up to 10 per cent. Adding a VSD to a pump, fan, or compressor typically reduces its power draw by around a quarter. Layered together, these are not incremental gains; they are among the largest, most immediately actionable efficiency levers available to industry anywhere.

What should make this particularly attractive for CFOs and operations heads in the region is that it does not require the capital intensity, planning approval, or multi-year timelines that new generation projects demand. A fleet-level energy appraisal, pinpointing quick wins and opportunities to reduce losses, can be carried out without halting operations.

Upgrades can be phased into existing maintenance cycles rather than treated as standalone capital projects. And the payback period on high-efficiency motors and drives typically runs one to three years, a return profile that stacks up on pure commercial logic, well before sustainability reporting is factored in.

This is also where boards and operations leaders across the GCC need to rethink the conversation: efficiency upgrades are a fast-return business decision, and cutting emissions, easing pressure on the grid, and extending asset life all come as a bonus. Seen that way, the case for efficiency stands on its own, with no policy mandate needed to justify it.

National net zero commitments provide the macro backdrop and the long-term direction of travel. But the businesses that move first on efficiency will not be doing it to hit a target. They will be doing it because it is the cheapest capacity they will ever “build,” using assets they already own.

As the region’s industrial base, utilities and digital infrastructure continue to scale, the fastest gains available to meet that growth sustainably are not all sitting in the next solar tender or the next grid interconnection.

A significant share of them is already running, right now, in the motor rooms industrial leaders walk past every day and capturing those gains does not require a single new megawatt of generation capacity, only the decision to finally put what is already there to work

The author is VP, Motion Services Division, Middle East & Africa Region, ABB.