Brussels Airlines: The African Routes, Summer 2009

A page from this past summer's Brussels Airlines Spirit Magazine, showing its 14 African destinations, which it inherited several years ago from the estate of the old Sabena. Brussels Airlines is a curious carrier, a small, quiet airline in Europe, with no transatlantic routes at the time, but a dominant carrier to Africa, serving more cities on the continent then almost any other intercontinental operator, and the major connection between such cities as Kigali, Kinshasa and Monrovia to overseas destinations with its handful of A330s. The result is almost a feeling of an airline-within-an-airline, especially given Brussels Airlines's small fleet of regional aircraft spread out among the terminals at the half-empty Zaventem National Airport, with one end of terminal A, the so-called "T" gates, screened off from the rest of the departures hall by an extra passport control: this is one of the principal gateways between Europe and Africa.