Shell's Falcon 7X lands in Rotterdam after Iraq force majeure flight

Shell's Dassault Falcon 7X, registered as VQ-BXH, was tracked flying from Basra International Airport to Rotterdam The Hague Airport on June 28, 2026, a roughly six-hour direct hop across the Middle East and Europe.

If Shell executives were aboard, they would arrive at corporate headquarters the same week Iraq's Basra Oil Company ordered a near-total suspension of pumping at the West Qurna/2 oilfield under force majeure, citing a critical shortage of available tankers to lift crude from southern terminals, per Energy News Beat. The field, one of Iraq's largest with normal capacity of 460,000–480,000 barrels per day, has been slashed to just 50,000 bpd, and the broader export bottleneck stems from the lingering disruption of tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — still operating at a fraction of pre-conflict levels despite a June 17 US-Iran memorandum of understanding, as covered by Gulf News.

The flight follows a pattern of Shell aircraft movements between Europe and the Gulf region in recent days: VQ-BXH had been operating within Iraq and the UAE since June 26, while another Shell Falcon, VQ-BXF, flew from London to Basra on June 26. The return to Rotterdam suggests a high-level assessment of the force majeure situation and its implications for Shell's upstream operations in Iraq, where the company holds interests through its Basra Gas Company joint venture.