Flight Canceled: Tel Aviv to Cairo

For the first time in 30 years, Israel’s largest airliner, El Al, is looking to indefinitely cancel all flights from Tel Aviv to Cairo, Egypt. Under the 1979 peace treaty, Israel and Egypt had a mutual agreement to keep flights operational between the two nations. This unprecedented change is just another black mark in the list of deteriorating relations between Egypt and Israel.

“In the absence of a business justification, and in light of the financial resources involved in providing this service (high-security guidelines), El Al is unable to continue to bear the burden of these heavy costs and therefore our intention is to end the service to Cairo immediately,” El Al’s ceo Eliezer Shkedi wrote to Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman.

Currently El Al is the only airline carrier to offer a direct flight between the cities of Tel Aviv and Cairo. But as relations between the two countries have deteriorated over the past year, flights have been virtually empty, creating a situation where the publicly owned El Al will only continue to operate the leg if it is subsidized by the Israeli government.

Egypt and specifically Cairo has long been a popular tourist destination for Israelis. At its peak back in 1999, over 400,000 Israelis traveled to Egypt. However, since that time numbers have steadily decreased with the cooling of relations between the two states.

The fact that El Al wants to get out of Egypt just after Mohammed Morsi took over the reins of the Egyptian government shows that even the airline carrier does not have much hope for future Israeli-Egyptian relations.

El Al’s move is another sign that the historic 30 years peace between the two nations is rapidly nearing its end.