It used to be like any other national airline, receiving complaints about flight delays, ticket prices and bad food.
But since the recent effort to combat Hezbollah, Middle East Airlines has been elevated to an unexpected national hero — its planes taking off and landing just hundreds of meters from the explosions rocking Beirut.
Israeli bombs eliminated the top leaders of Hezbollah, the powerful Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group. The Israeli army devastated entire neighborhoods in Lebanon. And through it all, the airline, known locally by the abbreviation MEA, continued flying, sometimes just minutes after bombs hit the road leading to Beirut’s international airport. It is the only commercial airline still operating in and out of Lebanon.
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In a country haunted by corrupt leaders without an army strong enough to defend it, the MEA has become a source of pride for a population with few heroes to root for.
Local news channels aired video clips paying tribute to the airline. Employees praise her. And even with some passengers complaining about exorbitant prices, countless reports on Lebanese social media have praised the company.
“Heroes from heaven,” one person posted.
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“We stand firm and courageous, like the bravery of Middle East Airlines flying above Israeli bombs,” wrote a prominent Muslim cleric in X.
It’s all a bit much for Mohammed Aziz, a spokesman for the airline, who is eager to manage expectations: “We are not the army. We are not heroes. We are a commercial airline,” Aziz, a former MEA captain, told The New York Times.
However, the MEA could be considered a metaphor for the resilience throughout the history of a nation that has known too many wars.
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It was able to fly during the regional wars of 1967 and 1973, as well as the 15-year civil war that ended in 1990. It continued to fly during the 1982 Israeli invasion and Israel’s war with Hezbollah in 2006.
MEA has become a rare success story in Lebanon—it has remained largely profitable—despite the country’s repeated collapse into crises.
“We always have Plan A, B, C, D and even E,” said Aziz.
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Since Israel launched its invasion, the key to keeping planes safe has been a “crisis unit” established by the MEA and the country’s Civil Aviation Authority, said Mazen Sammak, head of Lebanon’s private pilots’ association and a security adviser to the aviation. They evaluate each flight, he said, and if a risk is perceived, they delay takeoffs or tell pilots approaching Lebanon to slow down until it is safer to land.
“Until now, we have had what has become a famous phrase: guarantees, but no guarantees,” he said. “These are not normal circumstances for flying or operating an airport — you don’t find another airport in the world operating with bombings 500 meters away.”
The airline’s persistence has helped give this small Mediterranean nation — surrounded by Syria, Israel and the sea — a sense that it is not entirely isolated from the world.
“As long as the airport is open, it means we are not completely screwed,” said Makram Rabah, a historian at the American University of Beirut. “There is a Mediterranean element here. People who live in the Mediterranean always like to adventure: whether it’s our seafaring ancestors, or our modern form of transportation, by air. You cannot disconnect Lebanon from the world.”
It’s not just the Lebanese who see the airline as this symbolic link — Israel too, said Rabah, who writes about Lebanon’s modern history.
He pointed to Israel’s attack on Beirut airport in 1968 in retaliation for the hijacking of an Israeli plane, led by Palestinian militants based in Lebanon. Israel destroyed more than half of MEA’s fleet, although the airline had no known links to the hijacking.
In fact, MEA was able to recoup its losses due to an entrepreneurial decision to buy risk insurance—not for conflicts in the Middle East, 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 arriving on yachts and private jets.
To magazine Time marveled at the company’s success in a region of heavily subsidized and government-owned national airlines, calling it “the most successful Arab airline since the flying carpet.”
The publication gave the company’s CEO at the time, Najib Alamuddin, the nickname “flying sheikh”. Alamuddin, a Druze with the religious title of sheikh, even used it as the title of his autobiography.
Inside Lebanon, Alamuddin, who died in 1996, became the first of many MEA executives thrust into the unlikely role of national negotiator to protect the airline, Aziz said. Alamuddin met with the country’s ever-changing constellation of militant factions, Aziz said, to ensure they did not attack the airline.
“Back then, it was a little more risky. We needed to coordinate with 30 different factions,” said Aziz. “It was actually much more difficult than it is now, with only two parties,” he said — Israel and Hezbollah.
The current president, Mohammed al-Hout, has been negotiating mainly with the US Embassy, which communicates with Israel, and with Lebanese officials close to Hezbollah, Aziz said. This is to ensure that the militant group does not attempt to use the airport and that Israel does not attack it. Al-Hout declined to be interviewed.
Aziz insisted that despite today’s dramatic images, MEA would not risk the safety of its passengers or crew, and that its decision to fly was the result of decades of experience navigating conflicts.
“Half my life has been spent on emergency planning. We have a lot of experience in this,” he said. “It’s what makes people trust our risk assessment.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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