Originally Posted by
B747-437B
I'm curious where you have seen that Houston will be operated via Lome? ET has been very careful not to specify which gateway they will use for the Houston flights.
Interesting point, I missed that when I read the linked article. The only other article I could see written on it says that ET hasn't decided yet which transit airport they'll use. Honestly I think they'd be crazy not to use LFW considering this flight is likely to attract quite a few oil & gas business travelers. All of LFW, ACC, DKR, and ABJ have TWOV for US passport holders (unsure of other passports, but assume it's reasonably universal), but have hard that LFW is pretty seamless for INT-INT transfer and ABJ is a complete mess. This aside, seemingly KP (Asky) is miles above HF (Air Air Côte d'Ivoire) in terms of reliability, operating somewhat ontime, and actually delivering you and your luggage to the right destination. I'm not aware of any decent regional connections from ACC and DKR.
Not sure, does ET have 5th Freedom rights to/from Nigeria? I certainly wouldn't prefer to connect in LOS over LFW but it's the only other logical point with W3, still I believe KP is quite a bit better. I can see Nigeria only from the standpoint that it's by and far the largest oil market in Africa, but for people going to the other oil & gas countries, it's certainly not ideal.
Then I could be completely off base and ET isn't thinking about these customers at all, instead looking only at the West African expat population, could be that the petroleum folks are going to continue connecting in Europe regardless, though that industry did support the SonAir flight to LAD for almost 2 decades.