The European Union has just updated list of airlines banned from flying into the EU for security reasons.

As Gridskipper notes,

It’s not the best time to be running a Congolese airline, as the country’s entire air industry (51 carriers strong) was effectively blocked from flying into the European Union last week due to abysmal safety, security, and cooperation records. They’re not alone however, as a total of 93 airlines were kicked out of the EU, with four more placed on restriction pending improvement. African airlines fared the worst by far, with similar national blacklists also hitting all airlines from Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, Swaziland, and Liberia.

Which led me to wonder…how does one get to from the EU to West Africa. I spent a few minutes of quality time with Expedia and what I determined is that there are no flights from London Heathrow, Paris (any airport), or Nice to Freetown, Liberia; Kinshasa, D.R. Congo, or The Ivory Coast in their database.

I wasn’t too surprised, given that most of the airlines on the EU List lack international callsigns or operator licenses and the U.S. State Department has lots of scary things to say about those places. I was potentially concerned that a major carrier might have operations in the region, creating a potential channel for poor local security to facilitate entry into the greater airline system (as was the case with the Lockerbee bombing), but this does not seem to be the case here.

But this still leaves the question, which I only ask out of idle curiosity (although, if this whole Information Security thing doesn’t work out, I guess I could always become a Soldier of Fortune): How does one fly from Western Europe to West Africa, anyway?