Flying Above the Bombs, a Lebanese Airline Becomes an Unlikely National Hero

It used to be like almost any other national carrier, fielding gripes about flight delays, ticket prices and bad food.

But since Israel’s recent invasion of Lebanon to battle Hezbollah, Middle East Airlines has been elevated to an unexpected national hero — its planes taking off and landing only hundreds of yards away from the bombings rocking Beirut.

Israeli bombs have taken out the top leaders of Hezbollah, Lebanon’s powerful Iran-backed militant group. Israel’s military has flattened entire Lebanese districts. And through it all, the airline, known to locals by the abbreviation MEA, has continued flying, sometimes just minutes after bombs have pummeled the road leading to Beirut’s international airport. It is the only commercial airline still operating in and out of Lebanon.

In a country hollowed out by corrupt leaders, with no army strong enough to defend it, MEA has become a source of pride for a population with few champions left to cheer.

Local news channels have broadcast music videos paying tribute to the airline. Officials heap it with praise. And even as some passengers complain of soaring prices, countless accounts on Lebanese social media have waxed lyrical.

“Heroes of the sky,” one person posted.

“We are steadfast and gallant, like the gallantry of the Lebanese Middle East Airlines that flies above Israeli bombing,” a prominent Muslim cleric wrote on X.

It is all a bit much for Mohammed Aziz, a spokesman for the airline, who is eager to manage expectations: “We are not the military. We are not heroes. We are a commercial airline,” Mr. Aziz, a former MEA captain, told The New York Times.

Yet MEA could be considered a metaphor for resilience throughout the history of a nation that has known too many wars.

It managed to fly through the 1967 and 1973 regional wars, as well as the 15-year civil war that ended in 1990. It kept flying during the 1982 Israeli invasion, and Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah.

MEA has become a rare success story in Lebanon — it has remained largely profitable — in spite of the country’s repeated collapse into crises.

“We always have Plan A, B, C, D and even E,” Mr. Aziz said.

Since Israel launched its invasion, the key to keeping planes safe has been a “crisis unit” established by MEA and the country’s Civil Aviation Authority, said Mazen Sammak, the head of Lebanon’s private pilot association and an airline safety consultant. They assess every flight, he said, and if a risk is perceived, they either delay takeoffs or tell pilots nearing Lebanon to slow their approach until it is safer to land.

“Up to now, we’ve had what has become a famous phrase: assurances, but no guarantees,” he said. “These are not normal circumstances to fly or operate an airport — you can’t find another airport worldwide operating with shelling hitting 500 meters away from it.”

The airline’s persistence has helped give this tiny Mediterranean nation — surrounded by Syria, Israel and the sea — a sense that it is not wholly cut off from the world.

“As long as the airport is open, it means we’re not totally screwed,” said Makram Rabah, a historian at the American University of Beirut. “There’s a Mediterranean element here. People living in the Mediterranean always like to venture out: Whether it was our seafaring ancestors, or our modern form of transport, by air. You cannot disconnect Lebanon from the world.”

It is not just the Lebanese who see the flagship carrier as that symbolic link — so did Israel, said Mr. Rabah, who writes about modern Lebanese history.

He pointed to Israel’s 1968 raid on the Beirut airport in retaliation for the hijacking of an Israeli plane, led by Palestinian militants based in Lebanon. Israel blew up more than half of the MEA fleet, though the airline had no known links to the hijacking.

MEA was actually able to recover its losses because of an enterprising decision to buy risk insurance — not for Middle Eastern conflicts, but to continue flights to India and Pakistan during a 1965 war between those nations.

The airline, like the nation it represents, was a source of international fascination as early as the 1960s — a period seen as Lebanon’s glamorous heyday, when it was a playground for celebrities and playboys who arrived on yachts and private jets.

Time magazine marveled at the company’s success in a region of heavily subsidized, government-owned national carriers, calling it “the most successful Arab aerial enterprise since the flying carpet.”

The publication gave the airline’s chief executive at the time, Najib Alamuddin, the nickname the “flying sheikh.” Mr. Alamuddin, a Druse man with the religious title sheikh, even used it as the title of his autobiography.

Within Lebanon, Mr. Alamuddin, who died in 1996, became the first of many MEA executives thrust into the unlikely role of national negotiator to protect the airline, Mr. Aziz said. Mr. Alamuddin met with the country’s constantly shifting constellation of militant factions, Mr. Aziz said, to ensure they did not attack the airline.

“Back then, it was a little more risky. We had to coordinate with 30 different factions,” Mr. Aziz said. “It was really much more difficult than now, with only two parties,” he said — Israel and Hezbollah.

Today’s chairman, Mohammed al-Hout, has mostly negotiated with the United States Embassy, which communicates with Israel, and with Lebanese officials close to Hezbollah, Mr. Aziz said. That is to ensure that the militant group refrains from trying to use the airport, and that Israel does not attack it. Mr. al-Hout declined to be interviewed.

Mr. Aziz insisted that despite the dramatic images today, MEA would not risk the safety of its passengers or crew, and that its decision to fly was the result of decades-long experience navigating conflict.

“Half of my life was spent in emergency planning. We have quite a lot of experience in this,” he said. “It’s what makes people trust our risk assessment.”

From the civil war until today, MEA has operated through conflict with a careful and ever-changing orchestration of flights that ensures only a certain number of planes are on the ground in Beirut at any given time, to distribute insurance risks.

After Israel attacked and invaded Lebanon in 1982, Mr. Aziz was among the pilots who flew the airline’s jets to Cyprus, taking off using only half of the runway to avoid sections cratered by bombs. It was his son’s turn to do the same as a freshly minted pilot during Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah.

Today, both his son and the son of the chief executive, Mr. al-Hout, are among the pilots who continue flights in and out of Beirut, Mr. Aziz said.

Despite MEA’s safety measures, Mr. Sammak, the airline consultant, said that continuing to operate put “big psychological pressure” on the airline’s pilots, who are trained every six months on emergency takeoffs and landings, but not for an emergency caused by armed conflict. “What if that happened during shelling, or during bombardment?” he said.

Perhaps the only ones who have a tougher job, he said, are those who work in the airport’s glass control towers “with shelling all around them.”

It is these dangers that have made some Lebanese cringe at the fervor over the airline’s continued feat of flight, exasperated that Lebanon’s reputation for resilience obscures generations of trauma.

“Of course they are resilient — not because they want to be resilient, but because they have no choice but to be resilient,” said Fawaz Gerges, a Lebanese American historian and professor at the London School of Economics.

As a child of Lebanon’s 1958 war, Mr. Gerges said he had grown up hearing Lebanese people asking “what war generation are you?”

“Resilience comes with a very high mental and emotional cost,” he said. “Most of us Lebanese are deeply scarred.”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.