Bahrain Prepares To Host Its First Airshow
Alongside ostentatious neighbors like the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain has tended to get overlooked as a Middle Eastern hub for air transportation.

Alongside ostentatious neighbors like the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain has tended to get overlooked as a Middle Eastern hub for air transportation. Yet, the island kingdom in the Arabian Gulf actually lays a fair claim to being the birthplace of aviation in the Middle East. Next month (January 21 to 23) it intends to point the world to its aviation future when it hosts its own airshow for the first time.

Eighty years have passed since Bahrain became the first Gulf country to receive an aircraft, when, in 1927, a group of pearl merchants chartered a flight to take them to Basra in Iraq. In 1932, Britain’s Imperial Airways started using Bahrain as a key staging post for its flights to and from India. It subsequently became the main en route air traffic control center for the region, a position it still holds.