Greetings everybody, and happy New Year!
If you haven’t seen my last screenshot topic, go check it out: A Trip To Cameroon in Belgian Metal.
Today, I completed my first pair of flights of the new year. Naturally, I had to do one of Brussels Airlines’ routes, of course. The flights to their African destinations offer some absolutely stunning views, some of which I’ll show here.
- Route: Brussels (BRU/EBBR) - Kigali (KGL/HRYR) - Entebbe (EBB/HUEN).
- Aircraft: Airbus A330-300
- Airline: Brussels Airlines (SN/BEL)
- Flight number and callsign: SN465 (BEL4KE), Bee-line 4KE
- Flight Time: ~ 9h30
- Server: Expert
And now, the most important part, the photos.
We begin our journey in the early and cold morning hours at Brussels Airport.
The aircraft that will take us on this journey is OO-SFX, a 15 year old Airbus A330-343 that’s been in the Brussels Airlines fleet since 2016. She previously flew with Singapore Airlines.
Here she is, pushed back and starting her engines, almost ready to taxi to our departure runway.
After our taxi to runway 25R, we use the full length to take this heavy bird safely into the sky. As we lift off of Brussels Airport’s longest runway, the rays of golden sun shine onto the fuselage.
(Fun fact: The hangar in the background is my future place of work!)
As with all Brussels Airlines routes to Africa, we pass by the infamous Swiss Alps after about 45 minutes of flight. By now, the sun has risen much further into the sky, illuminating the mountains beautifully.
Having left European airspace far behind, and being airborne for a handful of hours, we are now over Algeria, in the North of Africa. Before we pass into the airspace of Niger, we fly over Tassili N’Ajjer National Park.
As we fly over Chad, the scenery starts to turn much more green, leaving the Sahara behind us. The pilots are certainly enjoying the view from 35.000ft.
After a couple of more hours, and passing through the airspaces of the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as Uganda, we have finally touched down at our first destination.
Welcome to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Here we turn off of runway 28 after a smooth landing.
After about one hour on the ground, we take off again, bound for our next destination. This time, we use runway 10, taking advantage of the headwind to lift us smoothly into the air.
Our flight time is now much shorter, and our cruising altitude is only 21.000ft. We don’t stay there for long though, as before we even know it, we start our descent into Uganda.
We spend almost half of the flight flying just West of the banks of Lake Victoria, the larger lake in Africa.
As the sun starts to set, the iconic “b” is showered in a golden light.
And after an uneventful approach, we are ready to touch down on runway 17 at Entebbe, our second and last stop in Africa.
Here, the last moments of the setting sun make for a very nice backdrop as we are mere moments from touching down.
And as we turn off the runway, we come face to face with our big friend.
And that’s it! My first few flights of 2025 complete. I’ll be doing the flight from Entebbe back to Brussels tomorrow, so that makes for three flights, three days into the year.
Anyway, I hope you liked the photos! Please do let me know what you thought of them. I’m not particularly great at editing, but I think most of them came out quite nicely.