Daniel's been looking at the airline situation in Israel and noticed something odd. Everyone knows El Al — the security reputation, the flag carrier status. But there's a third Israeli airline, Arkia, that most people outside the country have never heard of, and it's going through a strange transformation. Air routes to and from Israel have been under enormous pressure since the war — foreign carriers pulled out in droves, and many haven't come back. Arkia, which spent seventy-plus years doing short domestic hops to Eilat, suddenly found itself filling the gap on routes it was never built to fly. New York, Bangkok, long-haul destinations. But here's the thing — passenger reviews are consistently grim. Daniel wants to know who Arkia actually is, and whether this airline has what it takes to deliver quality medium and long-haul service, or if travelers are just going to keep grimacing every time they see that booking option.
This is a fascinating case study in organizational stress. You've got an airline that was essentially a domestic bus service with wings being forced to become a transcontinental carrier in under eighteen months. And the reviews tell you exactly what happens when you try to do that.
So where do we even start? Who is Arkia, and how did a domestic charter airline end up flying to New York?
Arkia was founded in 1949 — right at the founding of the state, basically. Its original mission was connecting Tel Aviv to Eilat, and for decades that's mostly what it did. Domestic routes, some regional charters to Europe, but the identity was always "the airline you take to get to the Red Sea." The fleet reflected that — ATR 72 turboprops, Embraer 190s, previously some Boeing 757s for niche European charters. These are aircraft designed for forty-five-minute hops, not ten-hour transatlantic crossings.
The 757 could stretch its legs a bit, but you're right — that's a narrowbody doing maybe four or five hours to Europe. Not a widebody crossing the Atlantic.
And that's the core of what makes this interesting. The question isn't really "is Arkia a good airline." The question is what happens when a regional domestic carrier is forced by geopolitical circumstance to become a medium and long-haul lifeline, and whether an airline built for forty-five-minute hops can deliver on routes that are four hours, eight hours, ten hours long.
So it's the gap between what the organization was designed to do and what it's now being asked to do. And that gap shows up in every passenger review.
Let's trace how we got here. After October 2023, the air route map to Israel basically collapsed. Delta suspended service. United pulled out. American Airlines stopped flying to Tel Aviv. Air Canada cut routes. Ryanair and Wizz Air, which had built enormous low-cost networks into Israel, drastically reduced or eliminated service. Several Asian carriers did the same. And by mid-2026, many of them still haven't returned, or they're operating at a fraction of their previous frequency.
And that leaves a pretty stark choice for anyone who needs to fly in or out. El Al, which is expensive and was already running near capacity on many routes, or...
Or Arkia. And Israir to a lesser extent, but Arkia is the one that made the really dramatic move. They acquired or wet-leased Airbus A330s and A340s — widebody aircraft they had literally never operated before in their entire history. And they launched routes to New York JFK, to Bangkok, to Dubai, and increased frequency on European destinations like Athens, Larnaca, and Vienna. The JFK route is the most dramatic departure — that's a ten-hour flight from an airline whose historical average flight time was under ninety minutes.
Wait. Under ninety minutes. So for most of its existence, the typical Arkia flight was shorter than a movie.
Shorter than a movie. Tel Aviv to Eilat is about fifty minutes in the air. And suddenly they're doing ten hours to JFK. The operational chasm there is enormous. You need different galley provisioning — a fifty-minute flight might serve a snack and a drink, a ten-hour flight needs two full meal services. You need crew rest facilities — on a long-haul flight, the pilots and cabin crew legally have to have rest periods, which means you need bunks or rest seats. You need in-flight entertainment systems that work for ten hours, not just a overhead screen showing the flight map. You need different maintenance infrastructure, different crew training, different passenger expectations to manage.
So they essentially had to build a long-haul airline from scratch. In under eighteen months. With aircraft they'd never flown.
And that's where the fleet mismatch gets really concrete. Arkia's A340s are ex-Singapore Airlines and ex-Air France aircraft from the early 2000s. These are twenty-plus-year-old airframes. They're four-engine aircraft in an era when everyone else has moved to twin-engine widebodies for fuel efficiency. The A340-500 they used for the JFK launch was wet-leased from a European lessor — it came with a four-class configuration, including first class suites that Arkia had absolutely no experience selling or servicing.
A domestic charter airline suddenly trying to sell first class suites.
Right. And think about what that means operationally. First class isn't just a bigger seat — it's a completely different service proposition. Dedicated check-in, lounge access, multi-course meals, premium beverages, amenity kits, priority baggage. Arkia's ground staff at Ben Gurion had spent their careers handling Embraer 190 turnarounds to Eilat. Now they're supposed to manage premium passengers on a ten-hour transatlantic flight.
I'm trying to imagine the first week of that JFK route. The check-in counter, the gate agent looking at a first class boarding pass and just... not knowing what to do with it.
The comparison to El Al here is instructive. El Al has been flying 787s and 777s for decades. They have dedicated long-haul crews who've been doing these routes for years. They have maintenance infrastructure at Ben Gurion built around widebody aircraft. They have a loyalty program, premium cabins with lie-flat seats, kosher meal services designed for long-haul flight rhythms. Arkia had none of that. They had to hire pilots with type ratings they'd never needed before — an A340 type rating is completely different from an Embraer 190 type rating. They had to retrofit cabins. They had to figure out catering for eight and ten-hour flights.
And this wasn't a strategic choice. This is the thing I think people miss when they look at this from outside. Arkia didn't wake up one morning and decide to become a long-haul carrier. The market collapsed around them, and they were one of the only Israeli carriers besides El Al with the regulatory authority and the willingness to fill the gap.
That's right. And there's a distinction here between Arkia and Israir that matters. Israir also operates some longer routes, but Arkia was the one that went all-in on widebodies. The regulatory piece is important too — to fly to the United States, you need FAA approval, you need TSA compliance, you need all kinds of bilateral agreements and security arrangements. Arkia already had some of that infrastructure from its charter operations, which made it possible to scale up quickly.
So they had the regulatory skeleton. They just didn't have the operational muscle.
And the operational muscle is what determines whether the passenger experience is tolerable or miserable. So let's get into what it's actually like to fly Arkia long-haul. The reviews tell a pretty consistent story.
I've been reading through these. It's not pretty.
On airlinequality.com and other aggregators, the long-haul reviews consistently cite four things. One — aged, worn cabin interiors. These A340s are from the early 2000s. The seats show their age. The plastic trim is scratched. The overhead bins are the old-style ones that don't hold as much. Two — inconsistent catering. Passengers report meals that don't match the flight length. A cold sandwich on a ten-hour flight. Not enough food for the duration. Meals that feel like they were designed for a three-hour European hop stretched to cover a transatlantic crossing.
A cold sandwich on a ten-hour flight. That's not a catering failure. That's a category error.
Three — entertainment systems that are broken or non-existent on some aircraft. These are ex-Singapore Airlines and ex-Air France frames, so some of them have IFE systems installed, but they're twenty years old, the screens don't always work, the content libraries haven't been updated, and on some aircraft the system just isn't functional. On a ten-hour flight, that's a long time to stare at the seatback.
And four?
Delays and poor communication. This is the one that comes up most consistently. Passengers report that when things go wrong — and they go wrong fairly often — Arkia's ground staff don't seem to know how to handle long-haul irregular operations. Delayed flight to Eilat, you put people on the next one in an hour. Delayed flight to JFK, you're dealing with hotel accommodations, meal vouchers, rebooking onto other carriers, international passenger rights regulations. The infrastructure just isn't there.
So the reviews aren't saying the airline is dangerous or the staff are rude. They're saying the hard product is aged and the operational reliability is shaky.
And there are redeeming qualities that do show up in the reviews. The crew are frequently described as friendly and attentive — there's a genuine Israeli hospitality factor. Legroom on some aircraft is actually better than El Al's economy product. The fares are often significantly cheaper than El Al. And the load factors are high — people are choosing Arkia despite the complaints, because the alternative is either much more expensive or simply not available.
That's the structural trap. Arkia needs to fill seats to justify the widebody leases. The passenger experience is poor, which drives negative reviews. The negative reviews make it harder to attract premium passengers who'd pay higher fares. So they're forced to compete on price. Which limits the revenue available to upgrade the cabins and fix the catering and improve the operation. It's a spiral.
And the spiral has a clock on it. As long as foreign carriers stay away from Tel Aviv, Arkia has a captive market. Israelis who need to fly to New York or Bangkok have limited options — El Al, which is expensive and often fully booked, or Arkia, which is cheaper but rougher. The question is whether this geopolitical buffer lasts long enough for Arkia to invest in the product and break out of the spiral.
What would that investment actually look like? If they had the money, what do they need to fix?
Quality medium and long-haul service requires four things. Consistent hard product — seats, IFE, power outlets that actually work. Reliable catering that's designed for the flight length — a ten-hour flight needs two proper meal services, not a sandwich and a bag of pretzels. Crew trained for long-haul fatigue management and service rhythms — on a short flight you're constantly moving, on a long flight you need to pace yourself, manage rest periods, handle the mid-flight lull when everyone's asleep. And operational reliability — maintenance spares, diversion planning, crew scheduling that can absorb disruptions without cascading into twelve-hour delays.
And right now Arkia scores poorly on... three of those four?
The hard product, the catering, and the operational reliability. The crew are doing their best, but they're fighting the aircraft and the infrastructure. A friendly flight attendant can't fix a broken IFE screen or conjure a hot meal out of a galley that wasn't provisioned for it.
The maintenance piece in particular seems like it'd be the hardest to fix quickly. You can't just hire a bunch of A340 mechanics off the street.
There's a detail here that I think explains a lot of the delays. When Arkia brought in the A340, they didn't have a single mechanic with a widebody type rating. They had to fly in contractors from Europe. The parts inventory for an A340 is completely different from an Embraer 190 or an ATR 72. Different engines, different landing gear, different avionics, different everything. If something breaks and the part isn't in stock at Ben Gurion, you're waiting for it to be flown in from Europe or Asia. That's not a same-day fix — that's a ground-the-aircraft-for-two-days fix.
And every time an aircraft gets grounded, the schedule falls apart. The next flight gets delayed. The crew times out. Passengers get stranded. The poor communication reviews make perfect sense if you picture a ground staff that's never dealt with a ten-hour delay before and doesn't have the procedures or the authority to handle it.
There's a specific review I came across that captures the whole thing in one experience. Passenger writes — the plane was clean but the seats were worn, the entertainment screen didn't work, and the meal was a cold sandwich on a ten-hour flight. That's Arkia in one sentence. The fundamentals are there — the plane is clean, the crew are trying — but the product isn't built for the mission it's being asked to fly.
That's the verdict, really. Arkia has the willingness but not yet the infrastructure. It's a regional carrier wearing a long-haul costume.
Whether it can grow into the costume depends on two things. How long the geopolitical window stays open — if foreign carriers start returning to Tel Aviv in force, Arkia's widebodies become stranded assets overnight. And whether it can generate enough revenue during this window to reinvest in the product — upgrade the cabins, fix the catering, build the maintenance infrastructure, train the crews properly.
The other path is that they don't invest. They treat this as a temporary wartime measure, milk the captive market for as long as it lasts, and then retreat back to short-haul when the foreign carriers return. That'd be the rational short-term play, even if it means the reviews stay dismal.
That's the tension that makes this case study so interesting. Arkia is a seventy-five-year-old airline that spent most of its existence doing one thing really well — short domestic hops with small aircraft. Now it's being asked to do something completely different, under enormous time pressure, with equipment it doesn't know and passengers it never planned to serve. The fact that it's managing to operate these routes at all is impressive. But managing to operate isn't the same as delivering a quality product.
The load factors suggest passengers are willing to tolerate the rough edges for now. But tolerance has a shelf life. If the war ends, if the foreign carriers come back, if suddenly there's a Delta flight to JFK with lie-flat seats and working IFE and a proper meal service — Arkia's going to have a very hard time competing on price alone.
Unless they use this window to actually build the product. That's the open question. Are they investing right now, or are they just surviving?
There's one piece of this we haven't touched. The maintenance side specifically. And I think Hilbert has a story about that.
Hilbert: I pushed back Embraers for Arkia in 2019. Ground handling at Ben Gurion. The 190s to Eilat, mostly. I remember looking at the fleet and thinking, this airline will never fly anything bigger than a regional jet.
What was the ground operation like back then?
Hilbert: Small. Tight. They knew exactly what they were doing because they'd been doing the same thing for fifty years. Turnaround in thirty minutes, push back, next one. When they brought in the A340, they didn't have a single mechanic with a widebody rating. Had to fly in contractors from Europe.
I was wondering about that.
Hilbert: I know because I dated one of them. She was an A340 specialist from Lufthansa Technik, came over on a six-month contract. She said the first six months were a nightmare. Parts weren't stocked. Manuals weren't translated — half the documentation was still in French from the Air France days. The aircraft got grounded twice for issues that would have been a same-day fix at El Al. They just didn't have the spares or the people who knew where to look.
That explains the delay pattern. If the aircraft aren't mechanically reliable, the schedule falls apart, and that cascades into everything else — the poor communication, the stranded passengers, the negative reviews.
Hilbert: She said the biggest problem was the APU. The auxiliary power unit on those A340s is a specific Honeywell model, and the mean time between failures on a twenty-year-old APU is not great. When it goes, you can't start the engines without a ground power cart, and if you're at JFK and you don't have a contract with the ground handler for that specific equipment... you wait.
A twenty-year-old APU fails at JFK, and Arkia doesn't have the ground handling contract to get a power cart quickly.
Hilbert: Four hours once. She showed me the delay report. Four hours sitting at the gate at JFK because the APU quit and nobody knew who to call.
That's exactly the kind of second-order problem that doesn't show up in the fleet announcement press release. You can lease an A340, you can paint it in your livery, you can sell tickets — but if you don't have the maintenance contracts and the parts inventory and the ground handling agreements at every station you fly to, the operation bleeds delays.
Hilbert: She said El Al's maintenance operation is basically a small factory. They've got widebody-rated mechanics who've been working on 747s and 777s and 787s for thirty years. Parts warehouses, engine shops, the whole thing. Arkia was trying to build that from zero with contractors who were going home in six months.
Every time a contractor leaves, the knowledge walks out the door with them.
Hilbert: She left after her contract. Took a job in Singapore. I don't think Arkia ever built the in-house capability — they just kept rotating contractors.
That's... that's a structural problem that doesn't solve itself. If you're relying on contract maintenance for your widebody fleet, you're paying a premium for labor, you've got no institutional knowledge accumulation, and you're vulnerable to contractor availability. It's the most expensive way to maintain aircraft over the long term.
Hilbert: She said the A340 is a good aircraft if you know what you're doing. But it's not forgiving. It's a four-engine widebody from the late nineties. It needs more maintenance than a 787, more fuel, more attention. Arkia bought capability they didn't have the infrastructure to support.
The APU detail in particular — that's the kind of thing that doesn't occur to you until you've been doing long-haul for years. A domestic regional carrier never has to think about what happens when the APU fails at a foreign station, because their flights are fifty minutes and they never leave their home maintenance base.
Hilbert: She had this saying. "The aircraft knows what it is. The airline hasn't figured it out yet."
That's the episode in one sentence.
Hilbert: I still have the delay report somewhere. Four hours, gate C14 at JFK, APU failure, no ground power contract. Four hundred passengers watching the seatback screens not work.
Where does that leave Arkia? It's an airline in a very specific kind of trap. The maintenance gap Hilbert's describing is a problem that takes years and serious capital to fix. And they don't know how many years they have before the market shifts under them.
The open question is whether they're treating this as a temporary surge or a permanent transformation. If they're investing in maintenance infrastructure, hiring and training permanent widebody crews, upgrading cabins, building the catering operation — then there's a path to becoming a real long-haul carrier. If they're just surviving, just keeping the aircraft in the air until the foreign carriers come back, then all of this gets wound down and they go back to Eilat shuttles.
If foreign carriers do return to Tel Aviv in force, those widebodies become stranded assets. You can't just park an A340 and hope the lease payments stop. Those are long-term financial commitments. If the market shifts before Arkia has built the product to compete, they're left holding aircraft they can't fill and can't afford.
The flip side is that if foreign carriers stay away — and there's no guarantee they come back quickly, even if the security situation improves — Arkia has a genuine opportunity. Israelis need to fly. The demand isn't going away. If Arkia can get the product right, they could emerge from this as a legitimate second long-haul carrier, not just El Al's rougher, cheaper shadow.
The thing I keep coming back to is that none of this was planned. Arkia didn't choose this moment. The moment chose them. And they're trying to build the airplane while flying it, literally. That's a hard thing to do well.
It's almost impossible to do well. Most airlines spend years planning a long-haul route launch. They do market analysis, they configure the aircraft, they train the crews, they set up the station operations, they run proving flights. Arkia did it in months, with leased aircraft they'd never operated, during a war, with contractors filling the gaps. The fact that the planes are flying at all is remarkable. But remarkable isn't the same as good.
If you take one thing from this, it's the gap between what an organization was built to do and what it's being asked to do. Arkia's entire operational DNA — its fleet, its crews, its maintenance, its catering, its ground handling — was optimized for fifty-minute domestic flights. You can lease a bigger airplane, but you can't lease seventy-five years of long-haul experience. That gap shows up in every cold sandwich and broken IFE screen and four-hour APU delay.
The thing that changed how I see it is the maintenance dimension. I'd been thinking about this as a passenger experience problem — bad seats, bad food, bad entertainment. But Hilbert's point about the APU and the parts inventory and the contractor rotation makes it clear that the passenger experience is downstream of a deeper operational problem. You can't fix the sandwiches until you fix the maintenance. You can't fix the delays until you fix the parts supply chain. The hard product isn't just aged — it's unsupported.
Next time you book a flight to Tel Aviv and see Arkia as an option, you'll know exactly what you're signing up for. An airline that's trying to do something it was never designed to do, with equipment it doesn't fully know how to maintain, in a market that could shift under it at any moment. Whether that's a temporary fix or a permanent problem depends on how long the window stays open and whether Arkia uses it to actually build the airline it's pretending to be.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping this show running, and for the APU story that I'm going to be thinking about for a while.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you want to send us your own questions about airlines, infrastructure, or anything else that's been nagging at you, email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon.
