Drafted — not technically validated
Record revision 1 · The world's busiest airport for international passengers, opened on a sand runway in 1960 and hit by Iranian strikes in 2026.
A real-world airfield as described in public sources, and how sim maps represent it. Units, facilities and names change; each is dated where the sources allow, and the charts are not for navigation. Use current official publications for flight planning.
Location and identity
- Location
- In the Al Garhoud district, east of the city centre of Dubai [1]
- Country or territory
- United Arab Emirates
- Coordinates
- 25.2498° N, 55.3710° E [2]
- Identifiers
- ICAO OMDB · IATA DXB
- Other names
- None recorded
- Opened
- officially on 30 September 1960, with a compacted-sand runway able to take a DC-3 [1]
- Theatre
- Middle East
Role and operators
- Status
- Active · Civil
- Roles today
- Civil airport
- Operators
- Dubai Airports Company · United Arab Emirates, civil · as of Oct 2026 [1]
Units
Permanently based units belong to the airfield; rotational and temporarily deployed units are there for a period or an operation. Dates are when the sources place each unit there; "as of" is when a source described it as current.
Current
Dubai Royal Air Wing, with its own VIP pavilion and hangars opened in 2008 [1]
- Service
- United Arab Emirates, government (non-military)
- Basing
- Permanently based
- When
- since Jul 2008
Runways and facilities
The sources do not date these figures. Facilities not listed here are not documented in the sources cited, which does not mean the airfield lacks them.
| Runway | Length | Width | Surface |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12L/30R [1] [2]4,351 m | 14,275 ft (4,351 m) | 197 ft (60 m) | asphalt |
| 12R/30L [1] [2]4,447 m | 14,590 ft (4,447 m) | 197 ft (60 m) | asphalt |
- Arresting gear
- None documented in the sources cited
- Navaids
- None documented in the sources cited
Figure 1 — Airfield map of Dubai International Airport (to scale)
- Runway
- Taxiway, with its name
- Apron
- Hangar or terminal
- Airfield boundary
Runways, taxiways, aprons and buildings inside the airfield boundary, true north up, drawn from OpenStreetMap data retrieved 2026-10-28. Widths come from the map data or, where it gives none, a typical 45 m runway and 18 m taxiway. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the ODbL 1.0. Community-mapped, not an official aerodrome chart, and not for navigation.
Sim maps
Represented in: DCS: Persian Gulf
DCS: Persian Gulf DCS World · Present day
Represented as “Dubai Intl” · checked 2026-10-28 [3]
Only the maps marked represented or confirmed absent have been checked. Any other map may or may not represent this airfield.
Other maps in Middle East, not yet checked for this airfield, which may lie outside them: DCS: Syria, DCS: Sinai, DCS: Iraq, DCS: Iraq North, Falcon BMS: Israel.
Role today
Dubai International was the world’s busiest airport by international passengers in 2025, handling more than 95 million passengers, and it is the main hub of Emirates and the base of flydubai. [1] It is due to close once the expanded Al Maktoum International Airport at Dubai World Central is fully working. [1] The Dubai Royal Air Wing has had its own VIP pavilion and hangars at the airport since July 2008. [1]
The Iran war of 2026 hit it directly. Its airspace closed on 28 February 2026 when Iran launched strikes on Dubai, and Iranian strikes later damaged the airport and injured four people there. [1] It reopened with a few flights on 2 March, stopped again after Iranian drone strikes on 7 March, and was still in limited operation at the end of March. [1]
History
Imperial Airways flying boats began calling at Dubai in 1937. [1] Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum ordered an airport in 1959, and it opened on 30 September 1960 with a compacted-sand runway; an asphalt runway followed in May 1965, and the first jets, Middle East Airlines and Kuwait Airways Comets, visited in May 1966. [1] Terminal 1 opened in 1971 and a second, parallel runway in April 1984. [1] The original runway was closed by the 2000s to make way for Concourse C, and Terminal 3, built for Emirates, opened in October 2008. [1]
The airfield
Two parallel asphalt runways, 12L/30R, 4,351 m long, and 12R/30L, 4,447 m. [1]
Sources
- Dubai International Airport. Wikipedia (secondary source). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubai_International_Airport (accessed 2026-10-28). History from 1937, the runways, the Royal Air Wing pavilion and the 2026 Iranian strikes.
- Airport and runway data, OMDB. OurAirports open data (public domain, community-maintained). https://davidmegginson.github.io/ourairports-data/airports.csv (accessed 2026-10-28). Rows for OMDB in airports.csv and runways.csv: position, elevation and both runways.
- dcs-world-schema reference data: Persian Gulf airbases (Dubai Intl.json). dcs-world-schema, open-source data extracted by running DCS World 2.9.30.28536. https://github.com/YoloWingPixie/dcs-world-schema/blob/c3091e6c08fb8167e26145d0e33c10e4140c6fe7/dcs-world-reference/latest/airbases/PersianGulf/Dubai%20Intl.json (accessed 2026-10-28). With its beacon and navaid files, as tabled on the DCS: Persian Gulf map page.
Wikipedia articles are secondary sources and can change; they are cited with the date they were read. FAA airport data and diagrams are official but are reissued every 28 or 56 days; each is cited with the edition read. pydcs mirrors the DCS terrain data at the commit linked.