Only one city in a Muslim majority country excluded from new electronic device ban in US bound flights

This post intends to call attention to a little fact that I have not seen mentioned anywhere else. The new electronic device ban for flights arriving to the United States covers all airports from muslim majority countries that have direct regular commercial service to the United States operated by national companies, bar just one.

The Bureau of Transport Statistics has a number of customizable datatables that you can download. I created one covering all commercial international flights departing or arriving to the United States in 2016 (it only covers the first nine months). Then I manually selected all flights arriving from muslim majority countries. This is what I got:

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Country	City	Total flights to the US (Jan-Sep 2016)
Algeria	Algiers	1
Azerbaijan	Baku	138
Bahrain	Manama	1
Bangladesh	Dhaka	1
Egypt	Cairo	240
Jordan	Amman	437
Kazakhstan	Almaty	1
Kuwait	Kuwait	125
Malaysia	Bayan Lepas	1
Morocco	Casablanca	299
	Marrakech	1
Pakistan	Karachi	76
Qatar	Doha	2903
Saudi Arabia	Jeddah	471
	Riyadh	272
Senegal	Dakar	207
Sierra Leone	Freetown	1
Turkey	Ankara	1
	Istanbul	2984
United Arab Emirates	Abu Dhabi	1773
	Dubai	4336
Total Muslim majority countries		14269

There were flights from 21 cities in muslim majority countries, but eight of them had only one direct flight in the first nine months of 2016. That leaves only 13 cities with more than occasional flights to the USA. Ten of them are covered by the electronic device ban. 

The three not included are Dakar (Senegal), Karachi (Pakistan), and Baku (Azerbaijan).

However, all flights from Dakar were operated by Delta and South African Airlines, not by national companies. Flights from Karachi, all arriving at JFK, were operated by Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), but apparently PIA now only flies to JFK via Manchester.

That would mean that the electronic device ban in practice includes all direct regular flights to the United States from Muslim majority countries operated by companies from those countries, except in the single case of flights from Baku to New York, which are operated by Azerbaijan Airlines. And it certainly covers all flights from Muslim countries in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region.

Thus, what has been presented as a case-by-case decision looks much more like a blanket ban for companies from Muslim majority countries. This reinforces the doubts about whether this is a security decision or something else.

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