Fly the Friendly Skies of Palestine Airways

Palestine Airways has announced that the carrier plans to resume flights between Amman, Jordan, El-Arish, Egypt and Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coastal city of Jeddah. Regular flights between El-Arish and Jeddah were commonplace last decade, but its last flight was in 2009 carrying Hajj pilgrims. It is now resuming flights between El-Arish, which is in the northern Sinai, and Amman. The tiny Palestinian airline has a fleet of three aircraft and a staff of 100, including the pilots, engineers and technicians, all of whom are Palestinian. The fleet, set up in 1995, had been based in Gaza until Israel damaged the airfield, destroyed PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s helicopter, and banned commercial flights.