Sabena

» see sabena.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The Société anonyme belge d'Exploitation de la Navigation aérienne was registered on 23 May 1923 and flew its first commercial service on 1 July, Brussels to London by way of Ostend. Nobody ever used the full name. The acronym was the airline for the next seventy-eight years. Belgium was a small country with a very large colony, and Sabena existed mostly to connect the two, which is why the route map always looked lopsided: a modest European network hanging off an African one.

The postwar decades were the good part. New York came on 4 June 1946. Jets arrived in 1960 with the Boeing 707, and one of those 707s is the reason Americans of a certain age know the name at all. On 15 February 1961, Flight 548 from Idlewild pulled up short of the runway at Brussels, circled three times with the bank angle climbing toward vertical, then went into a field near Berg. Seventy-three people died. Among them were a farmer on the ground and the entire United States figure skating team, eighteen skaters on their way to the world championships in Prague. The championships were canceled.

Underneath the fleet renewals was a business that did not work. Sabena carried every obligation of a flag carrier on a home market of ten million people, and across four decades it managed a profit in roughly one of them. Belgium kept shopping for a partner to take the weight. It found one in 1995, when Swissair bought 49 percent and took over the management, which on paper read as the strong airline propping up the weak one.

The partner went first. Sabena filed for protection from its creditors on 3 October 2001, the day after Swissair grounded its own fleet in Zurich. The Brussels commercial court put the airline into liquidation on 6 November. The last aircraft home was Flight 690 on 7 November, an Airbus A340 registered OO-SCZ, inbound from Abidjan and Cotonou. Twelve thousand people lost their jobs.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the cash that did not come ~

On 17 July 2001 the two sides signed what everyone involved called the Hotel Agreement, under which Swissair would put fresh capital into Sabena. The size of that promise is the one number the sources refuse to agree on: most contemporary reporting puts it at 430 million euros, while en.wikipedia carries 258 million. What nobody disputes is that none of it arrived. Swissair was less than three months from grounding its own aircraft when it signed, and the Belgian liquidators spent the following decade chasing the Swiss estate for the difference.

~ the congo years ~

The African routes were the ones that made money, and for most of Sabena's life they were the only ones that did. The long-haul fleet was bought for Africa and the crews were trained for it. Léopoldville was a more important dot on the map than anywhere in the European network. A Belgian airline with a Congolese balance sheet is an odd object, but it was a stable one for about thirty years.

Then 1960 happened. Rioting against Belgian colonials in the months around independence sent thousands of settlers toward the airport, and the Belgian government simply commandeered Sabena's entire long-haul fleet to bring them back to Europe. The airline flew the evacuation of its own reason for existing. The African network survived the handover and kept running for another four decades, but after 1960 it was a route map without a country attached to it.

~ what flies out of brussels now ~

Delta Air Transport, the regional subsidiary, was the piece that had value. A group of investors bought it out of the wreckage and renamed it SN Brussels Airlines, which merged with Virgin Express in 2007 to become Brussels Airlines, which Lufthansa then took control of. The Belgian flag on the tail at Zaventem today traces back through two rebrands to a commuter operator that Sabena owned.

The name itself went to the workshops. Sabena's maintenance department had been spun out as a separate company back in 1968, and it still trades as Sabena technics in France, while the Belgian side passed to the TAT Group in 2004 and now works as Sabena Engineering. The flight academy kept the word too. Twenty-five years after the last landing, the only places the name is still painted are the hangars that were never the airline in the first place.

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