"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness"

With thanks to Keats there, but as many frustrated air travelers will be only too well aware, fog and Dubai International Airport are not happy bedfellows.

Every year for the last few years there have been major disruptions at DIA in the Autumn and to a lesser extent in the spring.
Now a simplistic rant would simply blame DCA or the airlines and leave it at that, the problem you see is that the instrument landing system, the bits of kit on the ground that help pilots to know where they are as they come into land, is not certified to cat 111, the level required for planes to land in fog.

"That's careless" you say and indeed any international airport worthy of the name is certified to level 111 in order to prevent the very problems that Dubai has every year.

However the rumored facts are not as simple as that, DIA used to have cat 111 certification, but ever since the run up to "Son of Gulf War" in 2003 the system has been playing up, resulting in the downgrading of Dubai - preventing foggy landings and forcing you and I to divert to a God forsaken strip of tarmac somewhere in the desert.

Speculation has it that the US have put into place, possibly in Qatar, communication systems that somehow are interfering with the operations at Dubai, despite consultations and protests it appears that little has changed.

So as we head into the season and if you end up spending the morning at sunny RAK airport, you know who to blame, and for once it probably actually is the Great Satan himself.