(Paris Orly => Pointe-a-Pitre) is listed as an international route surprisingly.
Last year when countries started closing their borders, Air Tahiti had to reroute their Papeete-Los Angeles-Paris flight via Pointe-a-Pitre.
It was a French Polynesia to French Caribbean to France flight.
They’re doing it trough Vancouver now that they know the Canadian government won’t cancel their flights at the last minute ;-)
However, it's not part of Schengen. The usual benefit -- no queues at the borders -- is pretty limited, when it doesn't border any other EU state, and anyone from the EU must arrive by air or sea anyway.
Since it is part of the EU, crossing the border is less-strict for an EU citizen: an identity card is acceptable, and there's less ability for people to be detained by border guards.
Well, that's never stopped Metropolitan France from creating queues at air-mode borders anyway.
Source: Flew from Brussels&Frankfurt and still got border controlled at Toulouse multiple times. Some bullshit about it being "temporary for 1 year" with endless renewals and no
I am quite certain that is a domestic route, at least for immigration purposes. Perhaps the airline industry differentiates territories as international for some reason.
* France - France (Overseas region and department),
* Russia - Russia (annexed region),
* USA - USA (commonwealth),
* China (People's Republic of) - China (Republic of)
Goes to show that the notion of "nation" has fuzzy borders.
Those routes are busy simply because there are a number of Egyptian expats working in KSA who travel back home for vacations and/or family events and stuff. Apart from that, Cairo and Riyadh are as international as you can get apart from the language - they speak different dialects of Arabic, they have different views on religion, they have extremely different cultures, and they call each other's food shit.
Both parts (Arabia and Egypt) were ruled by their respective dynasties for almost a half millennia, far longer than Ottoman rule.
I don't know why there's a lot of traffic between Seoul and Tokyo, but it's certainly not because the former was briefly ruled from the latter. Comparing these examples to the Russian and French examples is laughable.
Or that these aren't nations but empires pretending to be nations.
I doubt that...