Examining Brussels Airlines’ Longest Current Routes

Brussels Airlines was founded in 2006 as the flag carrier of Belgium following the collapse of Sabena and is today a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Lufthansa Group and a member of the Star Alliance. As a medium-sized European carrier, it utilizes a fleet of 31 Airbus A319s and A320s to fly to destinations across Europe and North Africa, emphasizing connections to the bases of its group partner airlines: Lufthansa, Austrian Airlines, and SWISS.

Photo: Brussels Airlines

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Brussels Airlines also maintains a fleet of ten A330-300s which it utilizes on services to Africa and North America. It is the former where Brussels Airlines is notably different from most European airlines, as it serves 24 different destinations across Africa (only fellow Francophone airline Air France serves more), often with ingenious triangular routes connecting these under-served African nations.

Photo: Brussels Airlines

These are the longest routes in the Brussels Airlines network, so let’s take a closer look at the A330s and their destinations.

The long-haul A330-300s

Brussels Airlines’ Airbus A330-300s are all secondhand and have an average age of 16.7, with the youngest being 14.3 and the oldest 19.8. Four originally flew with Cathay Pacific and arrived in 2018, and another four were acquired in 2019 in the fire sale when Singapore retired all of its relatively young A330s to make way for its incoming A350 and B787 fleets.

The final two are more recent transfers from Lufthansa, with another three examples expected to be acquired in the coming months as the carrier continues to build its African network.

Photo: Brussels Airlines

The A330s were refurbished in 2019 with the JPA Design “Boutique Hotel” cabin, which is a 3-class configuration of 295 seats, although the most recent addition (OO-SFJ) is still fitted with the Lufthansa interior and seat specifications and currently carries the Eurowings livery. The airline recently announced plans to do a further $110 million cabin refurbishment of all three classes, bringing the existing and newly acquired aircraft into a consistent layout.

Image: AeroLOPA

The longest routes for Brussels Airlines

Brussels Airlines’ longest routes are to sub-Saharan Africa. According to flight data for October from Cirium, an aviation analytics company, the airline has seven routes that exceed 3,500 miles, represented in the table below, and a concentration of 2,500-3,500 mile routes to the Francophone nations of West Africa.

Notably, this route network consists of several flights with onward connections, flying fifth-freedom triangular routes before returning to Brussels. As a result, despite only having 10 A330s in the fleet, Brussels Airlines serves 24 different destinations across Africa.

The Luanda-Kinshasa loop

Kinshasa is the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (or DRC), the most populous Francophone country in the world and, until 1960, the Belgian Congo. As a result, like other European airlines that maintain strong links with former colonies, Brussels Airlines flies directly to Kinshasa (FIH) from Brussels five times a week.

Image: Great Circle Mapper

But in a nod to the oil-fueled growth across the border in Angola, Brussels Airlines also flies directly to Luanda (LAD), its capital, twice a week on Sundays and Tuesdays. This is the longest flight in the Brussels Airlines network and connects onwards to Kinshasa. As a result, Kinshasa has a daily connection to Brussels either from the direct flight or the indirect flight inbound from LAD.

Photo: Brussels Airlines

Brussels Airlines competes with TAAG Angola on the LAD-FIH connection, which flies four times a week with a DHC-8-400, and Qatar Airways, which has a twice-weekly B787-8 service.

The Central Africa ‘Spaghetti Junction’

Brussels Airlines also maintains a complex network to four capitals in Central Africa that is a veritable ‘spaghetti junction’ of connections. Its most frequent service is to Kigali (KGL), the capital of Rwanda, where it flies daily with daylight flights that depart from Brussels mid-morning and offer spectacular views flying into “the land of a thousand hills.”

Image: Great Circle Mapper

This flight then has two different onward connections:

• Twice a week (Sunday and Wednesday), it flies on to Nairobi (NBO), the capital of Kenya, on a route where it competes with Kenya Airways (3 x daily E190 service) and Rwandair (2 x daily DHC-8-400 service).
• The other five days of the week, it flies on to Uganda and Kampala’s famous Entebbe Airport (EBB), a route where it faces intense competition from KLM (5 x weekly A330-200 service), Egyptair (3 x weekly A320neo service), Rwandair (3 x daily CRJ200 service) and Turkish Airlines (daily B737 Max 8 service)

Photo: Brussels Airlines

Brussels Airlines also flies directly to Nairobi three times a week, the second-longest route in its network. So along with the two flights inbound via KGL, Nairobi has direct flights back to Brussels five times a week. The final piece of the puzzle is a twice-weekly flight from Brussels to Bujumbura (BJM), the economic capital of Burundi, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika.

Photo: Brussels Airlines

This flight then connects to Kampala, ensuring that the Uganda capital has a daily service to Brussels due to the flights inbound from KGL and BJM.

US and other African routes

The only other route over 3,500 miles is the daily service to New York (JFK), which competes with Delta Air Lines’ daily B767-300ER service on the route. Brussels Airlines also has a five-times-weekly seasonal service to Washington DC (IAD) that ends in September, but it has no plans to make that route year-round or expand to other North American destinations. Instead, it prefers to codeshare on North American routes with Star Alliance partners United Airlines and Air Canada.

Photo: Brussels Airlines

Brussels Airlines also has numerous direct connections to Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and other West African states. Indeed, its network is so extensive that it will be interesting to see where it expands with the addition of the new A330s. Given Air France’s recent rapid expansion in Tanzania to cater to the surge in safari and beach tourism there, it is not hard to imagine Brussels Airlines planning a triangular route that takes in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam.