The Late Night Pour | Check with Your Airline
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| SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2026 · DAY 225 |
| The Late Night Pour |
Check with Your Airline
Day 225. A strike on King Khalid International, the main airport in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia’s capital), killed 12 people and wounded 309 on Saturday, after strikes there on Wednesday and Thursday had already killed four. An injured traveler told Reuters that part of the ceiling near a departure gate came down. Ansarallah, the movement that governs most of northwest Yemen from Sanaa (Yemen’s capital), claimed the week’s earlier strikes, and after this one the head of its media office posted that the group had “shut down Riyadh international airport,” which Reuters reports as a claim of responsibility. (CBS News · Aviation authority toll, Oct 10; AFP via Malay Mail · Oct 7; CBS News · Live file, Oct 9 and 10; Reuters via Jerusalem Post · Airport strike, Oct 10)
Who gets on a plane at an airport that took a ballistic missile two days earlier?
Here’s the week behind that question. On Monday, Ansarallah told every airline flying over Saudi Arabia that the country’s skies were now part of the war, and that night it said it had fired on King Khalid. On Wednesday, a strike there killed a man, and flights stopped for a little over an hour and then started again. On Thursday morning, Ansarallah repeated the warning “for the last time” while the departure board showed 58 flights delayed and 11 cancelled, and later that day a strike killed a captain with Saudia, the national airline, and two other people and heavily damaged a parked airliner. By Friday, Saudi media were reporting that air traffic was back to normal, and Ansarallah had said the only flights allowed into Riyadh were humanitarian ones carrying its permit. None of this was hidden, since the warnings were posted in public and Saudi Arabia’s own aviation authority announced the dead, and on Saturday there were travelers at the departure gates again when the next strike came. I wouldn’t have gone near that airport after Wednesday. Boarding there on Saturday was Russian roulette played after the gun had already gone off twice, and I went looking for who was playing and what they’d been told. (dpa via GNA · Oct 5 notice; AeroCorner · Monday’s claimed strike; The National · Thursday’s board, Oct 8; AP via News4Jax · Final warning, Oct 8; CBS News · Live file, Oct 9 and 10; Reuters via Jerusalem Post · Airport strike, Oct 10; Al Jazeera · Flights resume, Oct 9)
The warning is older than this week. On July 14, the day after a strike hit the runway at Sanaa’s airport, Ansarallah warned every airline to stay out of Saudi airspace until the Saudi-led blockade of that airport was lifted. Monday’s notice, from its coordination center in Sanaa, called the kingdom’s skies a theater of military operations, exempted Mecca and Medina (the two holiest sites in Islam) for the sake of pilgrims, and said it wouldn’t answer for what followed. The reason it gave was Saudi airstrikes on Yemen, where 100 jets from the Saudi-led coalition had flown that morning and where, a day later, the health ministry in Sanaa said one strike killed six members of a family in Hajjah, four of them children. (FDD’s Long War Journal · July 14 warning; dpa via GNA · Oct 5 notice; AFP via Hürriyet Daily News · Coalition jets, Oct 5; AFP via Malay Mail · Oct 7)
Airlines with somewhere else to fly acted on it. By Friday, Lufthansa, Air India, Emirates, Etihad, flydubai, Air Arabia and Pakistan International had suspended flights to Riyadh, and Europe’s aviation regulator had advised against parts of Saudi airspace. The airlines based in the kingdom cut their schedules and kept flying. On Thursday, the day Capt. Hamoud Ali Alkalthami and two other Saudis were killed, Saudia had cancelled 97 of its 140 departures by late afternoon, and across the airport 293 of the day’s 747 flights were off while the rest were still listed. (CBS News · Live file, Oct 9 and 10; Khaleej Times · Cirium count, Oct 8; Gulf News · Cirium count, Oct 8)
The casualty lists say who was there, and on Saturday that was four Saudis, two Bangladeshis, an American, an Egyptian, a Jordanian, a Palestinian, a Sudanese and a Syrian. Wednesday’s dead was a Sudanese resident, and Thursday’s delay board included a Yemenia flight to Aden, the city in southern Yemen where the Saudi-backed government sits, running more than three hours late. The list reads like the region’s workforce and its neighbors, and it can’t tell you why any one of them was traveling or how much they knew about the risk. (CBS News · Aviation authority toll, Oct 10; CBS News · Live file, Oct 9 and 10; The National · Thursday’s board, Oct 8)
What Ansarallah announced and what passengers were told inside Saudi Arabia aren’t the same thing. AFP reports that Saudi Arabia has kept tight control of information about the strikes on its soil, leaving residents unclear about the danger. The kingdom has a way to alert people on the ground, and on Sept 19 it used it, sending phone alerts across Riyadh hours before a fire broke out at the airport’s fuel storage. Reuters reports that Saturday’s strike came with no alert from the kingdom’s threat warning system. What passengers had was the airport’s advice, given on Thursday and again on Saturday, to check their flight’s status with their airline. (CBS News · Live file, Oct 9 and 10; Reuters via South China Morning Post · Sept 19 alerts; Reuters via Jerusalem Post · Airport strike, Oct 10; Gulf News · Airport advisory, Oct 8; Arab News · Airport advisory, Oct 10)
As for why the airport stays open, part of the answer is that King Khalid moved 37 million people in 2024, and part, I think, is that closing it would concede what Ansarallah claimed on Friday, which is that it now decides what lands in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia has made that same claim over Sanaa’s airport for 11 years. In April 2015, Saudi jets bombed Sanaa’s runway to keep an Iranian plane carrying aid from landing, and from Aug 2016 until a truce in 2022, the Saudi-led coalition kept the airport shut to most flights. Then on July 13 of this year, a strike claimed by Yemen’s Saudi-backed government hit the runway again to keep another Iranian plane from landing, this one carrying Ansarallah’s delegation home from the funeral of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. The plane diverted to Hodeidah, on Yemen’s Red Sea coast, and the warning to airlines came the next day. (Khaleej Times · Cirium count, Oct 8; AP via Fox · Runway, April 2015; AFP via Jordan Times · Airport blockade; Xinhua · Runway, July 13; FDD’s Long War Journal · July 14 warning)
It’s Russian roulette, and the passenger picks up the gun by boarding. The record says who loaded it, because Ansarallah has announced as much since July, and who keeps the game going, because Saudi Arabia holds the airport open, controls the news about the strikes and sent no alert on Saturday. It doesn’t say why anyone still plays after a warning that plain and four deaths at the same airport in the same week. The only thing I can offer is that a flight still on the schedule tells you what the people who run the airport have decided, which isn’t the same as telling you it’s safe. (CBS News · Live file, Oct 9 and 10; Reuters via Jerusalem Post · Airport strike, Oct 10)
Isaias Kills Four as Gulf Oil Shut-Ins Climb Past Two-Thirds
Isaias has killed four people, two in Florida’s Escambia County and two in Alabama, and what’s left of it was about 75 miles south of Nashville on Saturday night and expected to dissipate Sunday. Power is coming back, with more than 700,000 customers in seven states still out Saturday afternoon and the number above 450,000 by late evening, according to CBS. Offshore, the numbers went the other way: federal regulators said 68.76 percent of Gulf of Mexico oil output was shut in as of late Saturday morning, about 1.4 million barrels a day and up from about 63 percent before landfall. The Energy Department authorized emergency exchanges of up to 2 million barrels of reserve crude each for ExxonMobil and BP America, and the president approved an emergency declaration for Georgia.
| Dead: four · two in Escambia County, Florida, and two in Alabama, in the Birmingham area and Barbour County |
| Now: remnant about 75 miles south of Nashville, winds 25 mph, moving northeast at 16 mph · expected to dissipate Sunday |
| Dark: more than 700,000 customers at 2:21 p.m. ET · Florida 422,357, Alabama 200,930, Georgia 44,877 · above 450,000 by late evening, per CBS |
| Offshore oil: 68.76 percent shut in, 1,402,692 barrels a day · operator reports as of 11 a.m. CDT Saturday |
| Offshore gas: 57.44 percent shut in · 113 of 371 staffed platforms evacuated |
| Reserve: emergency exchanges of up to 2 million barrels each for ExxonMobil and BP America, to be repaid in 2027 |
| Federal: emergency declaration for Georgia approved Saturday |
US Jet Disables a Cargo Ship; Kremlin Says Putin Relayed Iran’s Position
Day 225. A US fighter jet put a precision munition into the stern of the Panama-flagged cargo ship Ocean Molica in the Gulf of Oman on Saturday after it left an Iranian port, and Central Command said the crew wasn’t hurt. The command counts four commercial vessels disabled, 135 turned around and 10 tankers destroyed since the blockade resumed July 14. The Kremlin said Vladimir Putin, “in coordination with the Iranian president,” passed Iran’s views on ending the war to President Trump in a Friday phone call. It didn’t say what those views were or how Trump answered.
Tanker Set Afire in the Strait as Iran Reviews the US Reply
An outbound tanker was hit on its port side by an unknown projectile in the Strait of Hormuz and caught fire, the British maritime monitor UKMTO reported overnight. The crew was reported safe, and nobody’s said who fired. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which claimed a strike Friday on a gas carrier it said was using an illegal route, says its forces “have taken control of the administration of the strait.” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, has said his government is still reviewing the American answer to its offer to reopen the waterway inside seven days.
Strikes Kill at Least Five in Gaza on the Ceasefire’s First Anniversary
Israeli strikes killed at least five Palestinians in Gaza on Saturday, a year to the day after the ceasefire took effect, four of them near a mall in Gaza City, medics told Reuters. Al Jazeera, citing medical sources, put the day’s dead at eight, an 8-year-old girl among them. The Israeli military said the two strikes it carried out targeted militants and gave no further detail. Gaza’s health ministry counts 1,481 people killed since the truce began, and Israel says four of its soldiers have been killed by militants in that time.
Ethiopian Troops Enter Adigrat; Eritrea Takes Its Case to the UN
Ethiopian military vehicles and troops rolled into Adigrat on Saturday, about 15 miles from the Eritrean border, in footage shot by the Associated Press, and a commander of a militia allied with the government said they’d retaken the city. AP couldn’t establish who held it before or whether Eritrean troops had been there. Eritrea’s foreign minister, Osman Saleh, asked the UN Security Council to “forcefully condemn Ethiopia’s deplorable declaration of war.” Ethiopia’s own letter to the council, dated Friday, invokes its right to self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter and doesn’t say what measures it’s taking.
Ferguson Tells Ferry Engineers Their Pay Gap Can’t Be Fixed Right Away
Days after crew call-outs caused major disruptions across Washington State Ferries, Gov. Bob Ferguson wrote to the engineers’ union that he’s committed to “correcting pay disparities between deck and engine” but that “this is not a problem that can be solved immediately.” He ordered a salary survey ahead of next summer’s contract talks, and his office said pay can’t be taken up in the coming legislative session. The Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Association represents 417 engineers, and an oiler on the ferry Spokane says engine-room pay has slipped 20 percent behind deck pay. Ferguson wrote that “it is imperative that there are no further service disruptions.”
Sounders Win 3-0 at New England; USC Beats Penn State 31-23
Hassani Dotson scored in the 15th minute, Dejan Joveljić and Paul Arriola added late goals, and Andrew Thomas made five saves for his eighth shutout as Seattle beat the Revolution in Foxborough and ran its unbeaten streak to nine. No. 19 USC won 31-23 at Penn State in front of a Beaver Stadium record 114,419, with Jayden Maiava throwing for 301 yards and three touchdowns. In Cleveland, José Ramírez’s two-run homer beat the White Sox 2-0 in Game 5 and sent the Guardians to the ALCS against Tampa Bay. Sunday the Seahawks host the 49ers at 1:25 on FOX, and the Kraken are at the Capitals at 2.
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