Saturday, August 27, 2011

Arik Air: The Domestic Services, c.2009

A crude, sharply-angled paint-graphic file, showing a young Arik Air's domestic network sometime in or around 2009, via this website. Nigeria's shape is approximated in a crude, ivory cut-out, overlapping the surrounding landmass, with pixelated borders, routes and labels.

The already fast-growing Nigerian carrier linked Lagos to 8 cities, with extra connections between the Federal capital, Abuja, and the important oil ports of the southern Delta, Port Harcourt (misspelled above) and Calabar.

A more recent and much slicker cartography is displayed on Arik's own website (posted recently here), which shows a wider network domestically--but still almost entirely centered around Lagos and Abuja, although the airline now stretches from New York to Johannesburg.

Friday, August 26, 2011

Air Zimbabwe: The Worldwide Network, c.2006

Via the Travel House UK website comes this undated, computer-generated artifact. Only Africa is shown (and its unclear why the map of Zimbabwe is repeated at left), with red arrows angling out to destinations in Asia and the UK.

Of uncertain vitage, it can be at least cross-referenced with the Timetable Image's archive of the March-October 2006 AirZim schedule, which included once-weekly Dubai-Lubumbashi-Harare and Harare-Singapore-Beijing jaunts (using the same ageing B767 that also reached Gatwick). The B737 reached as far as Mauritius. All but Beijing and London are today erstwhile, as Air Zimbabwe continues to suffer, its zigzag-striped Boeings as pariah as the regime that owns it.

The latest news out this month is a bizarre report that the strike-ridden, cash-strapped, trade-embargoed airline will be acquiring new Airbus jets. This just weeks after pilots refused to operate the current, ancient fleet until they were paid back wages, and amid talk of a need for either a government bailout, privatization, or liquidation.

Now Arriving

Timetablist has returned, via (New York-JFK), (Providence), Boston, Amsterdam, (Frankfurt), (Nuremberg), Munich, Malta, Munich, (Cologne), (Amsterdam), (Brussels), Paris-CDG, Conakry, and Monrovia-Robertsfield. Posting to resume worthwith.