Gulf War 1 and EK
Was a young FO at EK during the first Gulf war. Flew in the penultimate inbound flight from Bombay, on 15 January 1991 with George G (RIP buddy), the night before the balloon was due to go up. Dubai airport was practically taken over the Pennsylvania National Guard - a load of KC-135 tankers were everywhere.
It was pretty tense in Dubai. No one knew how far a Scud could go. Some embassies (not mine) issued gas masks to their citizens. We were all pretty resigned to our fates and had a huge party the night the deadline for Saddam to vacate Kuwait expired. The next day we realized it was just a turkey shoot. Dubai TV went live 24/7 from that day. Before that it signed off at 2300 hours. No internet obviously so that was our sole source of news! Another world.
EK started flying about three or four days into the conflict - on January 19th I operated OMDB-LGAT-EDDF in an A310. We routed to the east and south, flying to MCT then down to the Red Sea before turning north. We were the only civilian aircraft in the sky I think. Athens was a tech stop and we returned via Iranian airspace - which wasn't closed at the time.
That was the beginning of the transformation at EK and Dubai - which was a small town with a tiny little airline. Brings back fond memories, but it was kind of scary at the time.