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In a first, Saudi private jet lands in Israel airport

October 28, 2021
The Commune

In a significant development, for the first time, an Israeli private jet landed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Tuesday (October 26) morning, per KAN news just a day after the first flight from Saudi Arabia landed in Israel.

After the signing of the Abraham Accords, this is the first public flight from Israel that has ever landed in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, report JPost.

On Monday the first flight from Saudi Arabia, an Emirati 737 Royal Jet landed in Israel in Ben-Gurion airport. 

Such development will now go a long way in improving regional ties for Israel as the historic accord has helped normalize ties with four nations — UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.

However, there are no commercial flights between Saudi Arabia and Israel, as the two states share no official diplomatic relations, but still, this is a considerable advancement in Saudi-Israeli relations, as both nations finally opened their airspaces to each other just last year.

Since its independence in 1948, Israel has been a nation under siege surrounded by countries that wanted to wipe it from the face of the earth. But after the 2020 normalization of ties with Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco, and the UAE and the subsequent opening of airspaces to Israeli flights to these nations, there has been a marked improvement with it comes to national security.

Not so long ago, El Al’s planes had to follow a long, winding route to Mumbai in order to avoid Saudi airspace, adding roughly two hours putting the Israeli carrier at a huge disadvantage to competitors, who flew shorter distances.

However, Israel still has to deal with many nations that do not allow direct overflight and they are Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Brunei, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen.

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