Brussels Airlines Was Born From Bankruptcy And Saved By Africa

ExPlaned · Sep 25, 2026 · 21m

In 2016 Lufthansa bought the rest of Belgium’s flag carrier for 2.6 million euros, less than the cost of a single spare engine, and then spent the next decade refusing to sell it, fold it into Eurowings, or close it down. The reason has almost nothing to do with Belgium: Brussels Airlines holds eighteen sub-Saharan African destinations, around fifty-six percent of everything the entire Lufthansa Group serves on that continent, on a route map drawn by a colonial empire that cannot be rebuilt from scratch. This is the story of Sabena’s collapse, the small Antwerp subsidiary that inherited its…