Saudi airlines rush to evacuate as much as $4 billion worth of aircraft stationed at Riyadh Airport in the face of deadly strikes by Yemeni Armed Forces, Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
The report cited Yemeni attacks on Riyadh Airport on October 10th and 8th, noting that private jets, commercial airliners and helicopters were parked at the airport when Saudi authorities shut its runway Saturday after a missile tore a hole through one of its terminals.
“The strike, among the most devastating direct missile attacks on a civilian airport, followed a Thursday Houthi strike that killed three others and damaged five aircraft,” it said, referring to Yemeni Armed Forces.
📰 The Wall Street Journal: Saudi airlines are racing to move billions of dollars worth of planes to safety as Houthi missile strikes escalate in the region. https://t.co/1YC4G2C2P6
— Middle East Observer (@ME_Observer_) October 14, 2026
Western media routinely refer to Yemeni Armed Forces and Ansarullah revolutionary movement as the “Houthis,” a label derived from the surname of the movement’s founder, Sayyed Hussein Al-Houthi. While the term has become widely established in international reporting, it identifies the movement by its family name rather than by its formal name, Ansarullah, or the institutional designation of the Yemeni Armed Forces.
The WSJ cited the flight-tracking site Flightradar24 as saying that the number of parked aircraft at Riyadh King Khalid Airport, which was 134 on the 8th, fell to 38 as of noon on October 10th. Airlines, worried about additional Yemeni attacks, are urgently moving aircraft to other airports.
Footage shows the evacuation of #Riyadh Airport following the Yemeni missile attack https://t.co/Ch4kuYFPex
— Al-Manar English (@manarenglish) October 10, 2026
At the time of the attack, private jets, commercial passenger planes, and helicopters were parked at Riyadh airport, leading to a series of aircraft losses. So far, a total of six aircraft are known to have been damaged, and their insurance-covered value is estimated at about $375 million (about 500 billion won), according to the report.
The hardest-hit carrier is Saudia, Saudi Arabia’s flag carrier and largest airline. On the 8th, a Saudia Airbus A320 parked at King Khalid International Airport’s Terminal 4 was completely destroyed, WSJ added
“According to officials, two aircraft parked on either side of it were also damaged by the blast. Among them was an Airbus A321neo delivered in April.”
A Boeing 787 of Riyadh Air, another Saudi airline, also sustained damage to its nose section from missile debris in the Yemeni attack on October 10th, according to the report. Riyadh Air had five aircraft parked on the airport ramp, but after the attack it moved four of them to other airports, including Jeddah and Medina in western Saudi Arabia.
WSJ said that despite Saudi Arabia having invested hundreds of billions of dollars in new airport construction, modernization of existing terminals, and the acquisition of commercial aircraft, a week of continued Yemeni attacks has pushed the aviation industry into crisis.
Source: WSJ (edited by Al-Manar)