Dr. Abdullah Al-Bussairy has been the Saudi ambassador to the Philippines since March 2015. On Wednesday, he met with officials of the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP) to discuss search and rescue operations to find Saudi flying student Abdullah Khalid Al-Sharif. Al-Sharif and his instructor, Capt. Jose Nelson Yapparcon, went missing on May 17 after their aircraft vanished from radar shortly after takeoff. Al-Bussairy has a Ph.D. in political science. His career began as a diplomatic attache with the Foreign Ministry in Dammam from 1985 to 1987.  He served as head of consular affairs at the Saudi Embassy in Bangladesh until 1992, before carrying out the same duties at the embassy in Kuwait for less than a year. He was then appointed third secretary at the Foreign Ministry in Dammam. In 1994 he moved to Khartoum, where he was head of consular affairs at the Saudi Embassy for five years. In 1999, Al-Bussairy was promoted to second secretary at the Foreign Ministry. He remained in that post until 2001. That year, he became head of consular affairs at the Saudi Embassy in Jakarta until 2008, when he became ambassador to Bangladesh.  In 2015, he was appointed non-resident ambassador to Nepal, shortly before becoming ambassador to the Philippines.