Gulf Air expected to announce new US flights after DoT grants operating permit   

Gulf Air, the national carrier of Bahrain in the Middle East, is expected to announce a resumption of services between its home country and the United States shortly. Rumours of the carrier’s long-awaited resumption of stateside services come as the US Department of Transportation granted the Gulf airline an operating license to resume services to points in the US after a decades-long hiatus of offering flights to Houston and New York. The latter was last served by the carrier between 1994 and 1997 until aircraft availability issues brought an end to the route.

Any such announcement that the airline is returning to the US would come following years of speculation by Gulf Air executives that the carrier was looking to resolve flights across the Atlantic. In September 2024, the company’s CEO indicated that service could start “by mid-2025.” According to reports, the Bahrain Civil Aviation Authority has made substantial recent progress in meeting FAA safety standards, paving the way for Gulf Air’s return to the US.

These efforts culminated with the award of the Operating Permit by the DoT and with the airline’s CEO, Jeffrey Goh, stating that the company would resume US flights as soon as aircraft became available to do so. Even as far back as 2910, the then CEO Kresimir Kucko stated that the airline was looking to return to US operations within three years, although the COVID-19 pandemic put a temporary halt to those plans.    

“We will be operating in the coming years more in Europe and also the Far East. Hopefully, in the coming two maximum three years, we will be able to open flights to the US,” Kucko said at the time.

Joseph GTK / ShutterstockAs recently as September 2025, Jeffrey Goh (who is a former CEO of Star Alliance) stated at a press conference that the airline could launch flights to the United States as early as mid-2025. When discussing the carrier’s transformation and plans to fly to the United States, Goh commented that, “We are seeing the light shining through the tunnel. If all goes well, we may be looking at a mid-2025 launch, pending aircraft availability.”

After years of struggling to find an identity for itself while living in the shadows of the Gulf ‘Big Three’ (Emirates, Etihad, Qatar Airways), Gulf Air is now forging a place for itself back on the international stage. Over recent years, the carrier has built a modern fleet of 32 Airbus narrowbodies and ten Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner widebodies, the latter having an average age of just six years according to ch-aviation.

Currently, the airline operates on 56 routes to 52 destinations across 31 countries, with its network stretching as far east as the United Kingdom (London Heathrow and Manchester airports) and as far west as Manila in the Philippines.  

Fasttailwind / ShutterstockAccording to travel website One Mile At A Time, Gulf Air will announce a resumption of services on the 6,613-mile (10,581km) flight between Bahrain International Airport (BAH) and New York-JFK Airport (JFK) as of early September 2025, with flights operating three times weekly to begin with. The current plans have a Gulf Air Boeing 787 leaving Bahrain in the early hours of the morning, arriving in New York in the late morning of the same day. The return flight will depart New York in the mid-afternoon, arriving in Bahrain around the middle of the following day, according to a source at the airline.

Alongside the airline undergoing ga major transformation and modernization in recent years, so too has its home base airport in Bahrain with an all-new $1.1bn terminal officially opening in mid-2022.

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