Dubai International Airport began 2026 with 8.7 million passengers in January, one of its busiest months ever. Only weeks later, the airport that finished 2025 as the world’s busiest for international passengers was dealing with ballistic missile alerts as the Iran war disrupted aviation across the Gulf, testing a hub that relies heavily on transfer traffic and tight airline connections.

“How many CEOs have you interviewed that have been subjected to direct ballistic attack from an enemy to your infrastructure?” Dubai Airports CEO Paul Griffiths asked Fortune. He said DXB received roughly 111 separate alerts of ballistic activity during the crisis.

In the first six months of 2026, Dubai International Airport handled 31.5 million passengers, down 31.3% from the same period a year earlier. Aircraft movements fell 32.1% to 150,600, while cargo volumes dropped 28.7% to 751,340 tons. Those figures followed a record 95.2 million passengers in 2025, the highest annual international traffic ever recorded by an airport.

Dubai Airports says the recovery is now accelerating, with monthly passenger traffic rising from 3.5 million in April to 4.5 million in May and 5 million in June. Griffiths said overall traffic is now back to about 80% of last year’s level, while Emirates and Flydubai are operating at roughly 90% of their 2025 levels.

“My confidence level is not misplaced that we should be back to 100% of our operation by about the end of the year,” he said, referring to the return of international airline services.

Dubai Airports expects full-year traffic to end “in the 70 millions,” well below last year’s record and far short of its previous goal of surpassing 100 million passengers this year.

The war created an opening for rival hubs. Before the conflict, Gulf carriers accounted for roughly one-third of traffic between Europe and Asia and about half of travel between Europe and Australia. By April, Middle Eastern transfer traffic on Asia–Western Europe routes had fallen 47% year over year, according to Alton Aviation Consultancy.

Travelers shifted to alternative hubs including Seoul, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Istanbul. Incheon International Airport said its transfer traffic rose 18% in the first half, helping it move ahead of Dubai and Heathrow in preliminary international passenger data.

Griffiths said he expects much of that shift to be temporary. Resumed services into Dubai are returning with load factors in the 80% to 90% range, he said, and airlines that moved aircraft onto heavily booked European summer routes are likely to restore Gulf capacity as winter schedules begin. He also questioned why some government travel advisories had not yet reflected conditions on the ground, saying that “it is safe” to travel to the UAE.

Several major foreign carriers have still not resumed service. British Airways has suspended flights to Dubai until the end of October, while Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines are also holding off until late October.

“My confidence level is not misplaced that we should be back to 100% of our operation by about the end of the year,” Griffiths said.

The conflict also forced Dubai Airports to improvise. During alerts, passengers were moved to safe areas, and aircraft could be landed quickly when threats emerged. When the airport was temporarily unable to fuel aircraft, Griffiths said it used a “splash and dash” contingency in which planes departed Dubai International Airport, landed at Al Maktoum International Airport, an aviation hub located 40 kilometers southwest of Dubai’s city center, to refuel, and then continued on their journeys.

Dubai Airports has also used the slowdown to keep working on infrastructure upgrades, including expanded self-service, biometric systems, smarter operational technology, and improvements to passenger flow. Griffiths said the priority is to make the airport more efficient rather than to rethink strategy in response to what he considers a temporary crisis.

That is especially true for Dubai’s $35 billion expansion of Al Maktoum International Airport, which remains on track to begin operations in 2032. The airport is expected to become the world’s largest, eventually handling 260 million passengers and 12 million tons of cargo. Griffiths said 10 million work hours have been logged on the project over the past 15 months, along with 17,000 concrete piles and 45 million cubic meters of earth moved.

He said the lesson from earlier shocks, from the financial crisis to the COVID pandemic, is not to confuse short-term disruption with a long-term structural change. When he asked Dubai Airports’ chairman whether the war had changed the emirate’s aviation plans, Griffiths said, “it was the shortest conversation, and the answer was ‘absolutely not.’”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.