Saudi air cargo capacity drops 33% in three days: Riyadh space falls from 3,925 to 26 tonnes

The Analysis

International air cargo capacity to and from Saudi Arabia fell 33 percent to 7,292 tonnes in the three days to 13 October, and Riyadh went from 3,925 tonnes to 26. A 99 percent wipe-out on one airport is not a rate story. It is a rerouting story, and the clock on it runs to 21:00 UTC on 17 October.

Let me get the numbers straight before anything else, because this one moves fast and the arithmetic matters more than the adjectives. Over the three days to 13 October 2026, international air cargo capacity to and from Saudi Arabia came in at 7,292 tonnes. That is 3,537 tonnes below the same three days a week earlier, which puts the prior-week window at 10,829 tonnes and the fall at 33 percent. The curbs at Riyadh started on 8 October. Riyadh's own capacity went from 3,925 tonnes to 26 tonnes, a 99 percent drop and a loss of 3,899 tonnes. A notice to airmen closes the field until 21:00 UTC on 17 October. Riyadh handled 576,600 tonnes in 2025 against Jeddah's 458,900 tonnes. Air France-KLM has suspended Riyadh until 31 October, Etihad until 19 October, and Delta pushed the start of Atlanta-Riyadh from 23 October to March 2027.

Here is the first thing I noticed, and it is not in the headline. Riyadh lost 3,899 tonnes and the country lost 3,537 tonnes. Those two numbers do not match, and the gap is 362 tonnes of capacity that showed up somewhere else in the same three days. Somebody absorbed it. It may be Jeddah, it may be Dammam, it may be a freighter operator that added a rotation, and you should find out which, because that 362 tonnes is the only part of this story that is growing. Everyone is staring at Riyadh's 99 percent; the actionable number is the 362 tonnes that moved.

Working out where those 362 tonnes went takes about twenty minutes and it decides which phone call you make. Ask your forwarder for three-day capacity by airport for both windows, the one that produced 10,829 tonnes and the one that produced 7,292 tonnes. If the extra tonnage landed at Jeddah, then Jeddah is where the queue is forming and where you should be booking today. If it landed at Dammam, you have a second option that most of your competitors will not have thought about, and a second option is worth more than a small rate win.

If it was a freighter operator adding rotations, then it is temporary and it can be withdrawn just as fast, so treat it as a bridge and not as a plan. I have learned to go looking for the number that went up during a disruption rather than the number that went down, because the number that went up is where somebody has already solved the problem and will charge you for the solution.

One thing to keep straight while you read the fall: the curbs started on 8 October, so the three days to the 13th sit entirely inside the restriction. The 10,829 tonnes from the week before is a clean pre-curbs baseline. That is useful, because it means the 33 percent is very close to the full effect of this event rather than a partial reading of it, and it means you should not expect the number to get dramatically worse on its own. What can still get worse is your own position inside that 7,292 tonnes, because everyone whose Riyadh cargo was pushed out is now competing for the same reduced pool, and competition inside a fixed pool is what produces the rate spike rather than the tonnage itself.

Now put Riyadh's size next to that. Riyadh did 576,600 tonnes in 2025, which is about 1,580 tonnes a day on average. The three-day figure of 3,925 tonnes works out at roughly 1,308 tonnes a day, a little under that run rate, so the market before the curbs was trading close to normal. After the curbs it is 26 tonnes over three days, which is about 8.7 tonnes a day. That is not a thin market, that is a closed one. Jeddah, for comparison, ran 458,900 tonnes in 2025, about 1,257 tonnes a day. The two airports together handled 1,035,500 tonnes last year and Riyadh was 55.7 percent of that. So the airport that has gone quiet is the bigger of the two, and the smaller one is now being asked to take the overflow.

I would also note that this gap has been widening for a while in the wrong direction for anyone whose network is built around Riyadh: the two airports are not interchangeable, and a plan that assumed Riyadh could always take the larger share is a plan that now has a hole of about 1,580 tonnes a day in it. If your annual contract was negotiated on the assumption that Riyadh uplift was the default, that assumption is the thing to renegotiate once the immediate fire is out.

There is a behavioural point about rates during a shutdown that catches people out every time, and it is worth saying plainly. The tonnage falls instantly and the rate does not. For the first two or three days most forwarders will quote you something close to the old number, because they are still working through bookings that were accepted before the curbs and they have not yet been told what the emergency rate is. Then the emergency rate lands and it lands all at once, usually with a surcharge line that nobody can explain. If you are offered space at roughly the old rate today, take it, because it will not be there on Friday. If you are quoted a premium without a written surcharge breakdown, ask for the breakdown before you accept, and if the breakdown says "emergency surcharge" and nothing else, treat that as a negotiating position rather than a fact.

Let me turn that into your own volume, because country-level tonnage does not help you until you divide it. Assume you move 8 tonnes a week from China to Riyadh and assume all of it has been booked on Riyadh uplift. A week is 7 days, so in a three-day window you are roughly 3.4 tonnes. Riyadh's remaining capacity for an entire three-day window is 26 tonnes for everyone. Your 3.4 tonnes would be about 13 percent of everything still moving to Riyadh. No booking system is going to let one shipper take an eighth of a closed airport's remaining space at the old rate. That is the scale of the problem, and it is why the answer is not "wait for the rate to settle."

Country capacity is down 33 percent, and if your allocation falls in line with the country, 33 percent of your 8 tonnes is displaced: about 2.64 tonnes a week. I want you to price that displaced tonnage three ways before you argue with anybody about rates. Way one, push it through Jeddah and truck it. Assume the road move from Jeddah to Riyadh is about 950 kilometres and takes 12 to 14 hours, and assume the extra road leg plus the extra handling costs you 0.50 dollars a kilogram; that is an assumption, not a quote, and you need your forwarder to confirm it.

On 2,640 kilograms that is about 1,320 dollars a week. Way two, pay the rate shock. Assume your Riyadh rate goes from 3.50 to 5.00 dollars a kilogram over the disruption, which is my own estimate based on how these things have behaved before and nothing more. Across the whole 8 tonnes that is 12,000 dollars a week, roughly 48,000 dollars a month. Way three, let it wait, and price the waiting separately.

Waiting is where importers and exporters get hurt, and almost nobody prices it. Assume your shipment is worth 2,000,000 dollars and it sits five days. At 10 percent annual cost of capital that is about 2,740 dollars. That is the cheap part. Now go and read the late-delivery clause in your sales contract. Assume it charges 0.5 percent a day capped at 5 percent. Five days is 2.5 percent, and on 2,000,000 dollars that is 50,000 dollars. Read that again: 50,000 dollars of contractual exposure against 48,000 dollars of freight premium on a month. If you spend this week negotiating the air rate and you have not read the penalty clause, you are optimising the wrong number by a factor of twenty. I have watched a customer win 3 dollars a kilogram off a forwarder and then pay out a penalty that dwarfed the whole freight bill, and the reason was that nobody opened the contract.

Then there is Jeddah itself, and I would not assume it has room. Take my assumption that 40 percent of Riyadh's normal volume looks for a way through Jeddah; that is an assumption, and the real share could be higher or lower. Forty percent of Riyadh's 1,580 tonnes a day is 632 tonnes a day landing on top of Jeddah's 1,257 tonnes a day. That is a 50 percent increase in volume through an airport that handled less than Riyadh did last year. Ground handling queues, truck queues, and customs halls do not scale linearly at 50 percent overnight. So when you price the Jeddah reroute, add a time allowance as well as a money allowance: assume two extra days at Jeddah on top of the 12 to 14 hours on the road, and treat that as a planning number rather than a promise.

The calendar is the part you can actually act on today. The notice closes Riyadh until 21:00 UTC on 17 October, which is the first date that matters. Etihad's suspension runs to 19 October and Air France-KLM's runs to 31 October, so even if the field reopens on the notice, the carrier capacity does not come back all at once. Assume a staircase rather than a switch: something returns after the 17th, more returns around the 19th, and the full picture is not back until the 31st. Delta's Atlanta-Riyadh launch moving from 23 October to March 2027 is a different kind of loss, because that is capacity that was about to exist and now will not. Assume three weekly frequencies at 15 tonnes of belly each, which is my assumption; that is 45 tonnes a week, and from 23 October through to the end of March is roughly 23 weeks, so something in the order of 1,000 tonnes of intended capacity simply is not coming.

Given that shape, sea freight stops being a joke. Assume Shanghai to Jeddah by sea runs 22 days and add two days of road to Riyadh, so 24 days door to door, against maybe five days by air. The difference is 19 days. On 2,000,000 dollars of goods at 10 percent annual capital cost, 19 days is about 10,411 dollars. Compare that with 48,000 dollars a month of air premium and the sea leg starts to look rational for anything that is not genuinely urgent. What I would do is split rather than choose. Assume 20 percent of your 8 tonnes is contractually critical or line-down urgent: air that 1.6 tonnes at whatever the rate is, which at my assumed 1.50 dollars a kilogram premium is 2,400 dollars. Put the other 6.4 tonnes on the water and tell the customer the real date now instead of the date you wish you had.

If you are importing into Saudi Arabia rather than exporting out of it, the problem has an extra edge, because Riyadh is where a lot of the inbound consumption sits. Assume you bring in 3 tonnes a week of temperature-controlled pharmaceutical product. Riyadh at 26 tonnes will not carry it. Through Jeddah you are adding a 950 kilometre reefer run, and assuming a reefer surcharge of 1.20 dollars a kilogram on top of everything else, that is 4,320 dollars a week on 3,000 kilograms. The money is annoying but manageable. The real cost is qualification: a cold chain that was validated into Riyadh is not automatically validated into Jeddah plus a road leg, and re-qualifying a lane is weeks of work, not a phone call. If you have a validated lane, get your quality people into the room this week, because a lane you cannot use is the same as a lane that does not exist.

Paperwork is where a reroute quietly goes wrong. When you move a shipment from Riyadh to Jeddah you are changing the arrival airport on the air waybill, the customs port of entry, and often the party that handles the last leg. Do it before departure, not after. If the master air waybill still says Riyadh and the aircraft lands at Jeddah, you have created a documentation mismatch at exactly the moment the customs hall is busiest. Get your forwarder to reissue the waybill, confirm the port of entry on the customs declaration matches, and confirm who is the notified party for the road leg. If you are shipping on a house waybill with a nominated consignee, warn the consignee in writing that the arrival point has changed, because a consignee who turns up at the wrong airport cargo terminal has lost a day before anybody can help them.

Two more things I would check, and both are cheap to check and expensive to discover. Ask your insurer whether cover continues when the carriage is rerouted to an airport that was not on the original routing, and whether the additional road leg is inside the cover or on top of it. A policy written for airport-to-airport carriage often treats a 950 kilometre road insertion as a different risk, and the gap is exactly where a claim will land. Then ask your forwarder which free time applies at Jeddah and how storage is billed from the moment the aircraft lands, because a congested airport is a place where free time evaporates. Assume two days of unplanned storage on 8 tonnes at, say, 0.15 dollars a kilogram a day, and you are at 2,400 dollars for doing nothing but being slow to collect.

There is also a straightforward commercial conversation to have, and it is better had this week than next. If you sell on a fixed delivery date into Riyadh, call the customer before they call you. The advantage of moving first is that you get to propose the alternative rather than defend the delay, and in my experience buyers accept a reroute through Jeddah with a new date far more readily than they accept a silent miss. Bring the number with you: tell them the airport is closed to cargo until 21:00 UTC on 17 October, tell them Etihad is back on the 19th and Air France-KLM on the 31st, and give them a date you can actually hit. A promise you can hit is worth more than an apology you cannot.

What I would not do is treat this as a one-week event and go back to sleep on the 18th. The notice runs to the 17th and the airlines run to the 19th and the 31st, but the Delta launch slipping to March 2027 tells you the airlines themselves are treating Riyadh as a softer market than they were a month ago. Capacity that was going to arrive in October now arrives in 2027, and every shipper who loses a week of Riyadh uplift during this window is competing for a smaller pool afterwards. If you have annual volumes to place, think about whether a part of them should be committed out of Jeddah or Dammam on a standing basis rather than treated as an emergency each time.

Here is the sequence I would run from today, 14 October. Get your forwarder to tell you, in writing, which of your bookings are affected and what the alternative routing is, and do that before lunch. Pull the late-delivery clause out of every open contract that touches Riyadh and put the exposure number next to the freight number, because the contract number is usually the bigger one. Reissue any air waybill that still names Riyadh where the aircraft will land elsewhere. Call the customers whose dates you are about to miss and give them the Jeddah option with a real date. And book the split: air the critical 20 percent, put the rest on the water, and stop paying a premium on cargo that was never urgent.

I have been through enough airport shutdowns to know the pattern. Tonnage comes back before rates do, and a customer's trust comes back later than either. Riyadh will reopen; the notice says so and the airlines have dates. What decides whether this costs you a week or a quarter is whether you moved your documentation and your customer conversations during the four days the notice gives you, or whether you waited for somebody to send you a revised schedule. Twenty-six tonnes is not a market. It is an invitation to reroute, and the invitation expires on the 17th.

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— By Leo