British Caledonian Schedule, 1977

A few pages from the timetable of British Caledonian Airways in 1977, demonstrating the breadth of its reach at the height of its operations, reaching on its own metal to Banjul while codesharing extensively with Air Afrique, Air France, and UTA Overseas French Airlines to Abidjan, Abu Dhabi, Bangui, and Baghdad with other connections to Bangkok and Bahrain on other carriers such as Singapore, KLM, Qantas, Gulf Air, and Thai Airways. The flight to Barbados is a rare bit of history: IQ2/IQ4 was a Martinair Holland DC-10 flying for the old Caribbean Airlines. 

Interspersed vintage black-and-white sketches give a flavor of the High Classic Jet Age, while an in-page advert feature's the airlines cargo operations. 

Abidjan: Evening Arrivals, 19 March 2017

Like the departures monitor shown in the last post, the evening arrivals schedule at Abidjan some weeks back was dominated by hometown carrier Air Côte d'Ivoire, with flights landing from Bamako, Niamey, Dakar, and Conakry in quick succession, followed an hour later by a domestic arrival from San Pedro.

As the time approached 7PM, the longer-range and intercontinental flights from foreign carriers began crowding the modest apron at Houphouët-Boigny International Airport: South African Airways from Johannesburg via Accra (which also stops at Kotoka International Airport on the return leg), then Air France from Paris an hour later. It is this flight, AF702, that is occasionally operated by an A380 superjumbo—one of the few to anywhere in Africa, and currently the only double-decker service between to francophone cities.

At 8:30, Rwandair's flight 222 from Kigali via Libreville and Douala, immediately followed by the Brussels Airlines link to Cotonou. The last arrival on the evening's board is the Tunisair non-stop from Tunis. 

Air France CityJet: Fly Direct from Dresden to the Heart of London, August 2013.

The Interflug posts earlier this week made mention of Dresden, at the time one of East Germany's secondary industrial areas, and one of all of Germany's most beautiful cities. 

Today, its airport is quite small, and generally has more leisure services to the Mediterranean than to the commercial capitals of Europe. For a brief time, CityJet, operating a wet-lease commuter operation on behalf of Air France, operated a London City Airport service on a BAe146. Sadly the service did not last. 

Air Afrique: Direct from New York to Abidjan, 1982

It's been two years since the Timetablist has dedicated a period of March as Air Afrique week, and in that time the archives have accumulated a sufficient catalogue to take up multiple consecutive days.

If given five more years of searching it could hardly be expected to rediscover such an emerald gem as this: a vintage print ad from a long-musted magazine; just barely emerging from the monochrome gloss of the class travel-advert era. Air Afrique, the flagship of L'Afrique Ouest, boasts a once-weekly trijet transatlantic service between North America and Sub-Sahara. This gleaming DC-10 would be one of the few that made such a run by this time, as Pan American had already started to retreat from Africa's tropical stretches. 

It remains unusual for an airline advert to field a full operating schedule; such mechanical particulars seem to perhaps detract from the less specific, more evocative dreams of an exotic voyage. Yet here, helpfully for our own contemporary and particular interest, is the full timetable of the overnight JFK-Dakar service, which continues on to Abidjan's Port Bouet. The return flight is in fact the outbound voyage, as the DC-10 makes the reverse route the night before. 

Interestingly, the asterisk mentions that the current routing, via Monrovia Robertsfield, will end on 1 January 1983, assisting in dating the item. Also note that the schedule boasts a starting point of the "Air France/Air Afrique" terminal: as if the single day-long layover of this antelope-masked tail per week warranted spending the name of the Air France outpost in New York. 

Ethiopian Airlines: Now Flying to Niamey Four Times Weekly, November 2013

Ethiopian Airlines leads the pack of pan-continental African airlines, a highly-competitive field which includes South African and Kenya Airways (and which faces increasingly stiff challenges from Emirates in particular). Niger's capital, Niamey, was one of the few West African capitals that Ethiopian didn't already serve; this was rectified last November with the introduction of four weekly flights, although not using one of the airline's sleek new Dreamliners as shown in this advert. ET937 does however use a respectably large B757 for the transcontinental service, which continues on to neighboring Ouagadougou, as does a number of other connections such as Air France and Turkish.

Air France: Paris-Douala-Brazzaville, September 1960

Riding the Gulf-of-Guinea gust of yesterday's post, we begin July with a September-stamped envelope: the announcement by Air France of its upgrading of the Paris-Douala-Brazzaville flight to a brand-new Boeing 707. The celebrated aircraft is gracefully championed in an elongated graphic element at top left, with the multisyllablic INTERCONTINENTAL linking “Boeing” and “Air France.”

In more recent years, Air France has served each city non-stop from CDG with B777s and A330s. Several other African airlines link Brazzaville with Douala.

Air Afrique: The Schedule from New York, 1990

Continuing with Air Afrique week, and continuing with the pages of the airline's 1990 schedule first posted by Airline Memorabilia, the services to New York, the airline's only American destination. 

Air Afrique's twice-weekly DC-10 flights from Dakar to New York-JFK were the pride of it's network, even more so than the flights to metropolitan France. Here we see the full operation of both services, which originate in Abidjan on Wednesdays and Saturdays, both stopping at Dakar's Yoff Airport before crossing the Atlantic. Interestingly, the mid-week flight stops in Monrovia's Roberts International Airport; while the connection between Liberia and the U.S. is obvious, it was neither francophone nor a member of the Air Afrique consortium.

Aside from Abidjan/Dakar connections to Cotonou, Lomé, Bamako, Lagos and Niamey, the New York schedule suggests a number of connections not via Dakar, but on a trans-atlantic Air France B747 to CDG, which shows the various Air Afrique DC-10 flights to Brazzaville, Bangui, and N'Djamena. Intra-African links are also suggested on Ghana Airways to Accra and Air Gabon to Libreville.

Special thanks to the excellent Airline Memorabilia blog for allowing re-posting of this unique item.

Athens International Airport Departure Board, 10 August 2012

An hour-and-a-half's worth of activity on an August Friday morning at Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport in Athens shows the contemporary extents of service out the Greek capital. Service across the Atlantic to both Toronto and Philadelphia by Air Canada and USAirways respectively, represent the long-haul, although MEA's flight to Beirut, the unusual Armavia's departure for Yerevan, and Cyprus Airways' service to Larnaca illustrate some of the varied services to the Near East that still exist out of Athens. Cyprus also offers its own service to Chania on Crete, while Star Alliance member Aegean Airlines and the still-barely-alive Olympic Air also service the many islands. Air France to Paris and Transavia to Amsterdam round out the next 90 minutes of activity.

Air France: Voyage de Concorde a Abidjan, January 1978

A rather speedier journey to Abidjan from yesterday's routing is this direct flight of Air France's Concorde on 11 January 1978. Apparently, this was a charter flight for le President de la République to travel to Paris, which he and his entourage apparently did in just under 3.5 hours; supersonic service to Cote D'Ivoire was not a regularly scheduled operation, and chartering Air France's Concorde was neither the most extravagant expenditure that Felix Houphouët-Boigny commanded as head of state, nor indeed even the only francophone African leader to borrow Concordes for personal trips to Europe (Zaïrean President Mobutu Sese Seko was famous for this as well, even building a Concorde-capable airport at his hometown of Gbadolite).

Its not clear just what the blue-inked edifice at the lower center of the envelope is meant to be. Air France's dashing new ribbon-tricolore branding, introduced that same year, is prominent at the far left and on the center of the cancellation stamp.

Air France: Paris-Dakar-Abidjan, September 1960.

One of Air France's first duties for its shiny new B707s was on the crucial bridge to its colonial capitals: Dakar and Abidjan, which began in September 1960. A handsome broad-side elevation of the airborne quad jet is imprinted on this envelope in Air France blue, under the title "BOEINGINTERCONTINENTALAIR FRANCE" and "Première Liaison" underneath. Several cancellation stamps provide the same detail.

Brussels Airport Departure Board #5

Early evening at Brussels Airport means departures by and large within Western Europe, mostly by Brussels Airlines, along with Air France, British Airways, Alitalia, Iberia and TAP. The only exceptions to this are the Eastern European carriers: Croatia Airlines to Zagreb and TAROM Romanian Airlines to Bucharest. The only non-EU flight is El AL to Tel Aviv at 7:00pm.

Air France: Paris-Conakry-Freetown-Monrovia, Spring 2011

Air France, like many European airlines, has been expanding its highly-profitable African services over the last few years. Its move earlier this year to extend its Paris-Conakry service to both Freetown and Monrovia on alternate days is somewhat unusual, as it crosses over the Francophone-Anglophone divide, which checkerboards West Africa, with very few flights in between countries that speak different languages.

Although seats are sold only on the intra-African leg, the tickets are hugely expensive, in fact more costly than a flight from the United States to these destinations via Paris.

Air France served Monrovia's Robertsfield decades before, but not any time recently, although its subsidiary KLM was a major connector to Liberia up until that country's civil war. This may be Air France's first time serving Sierra Leone.

Air France: Kuala Lumpur-Colombo-Bahrain aboard the Concorde, 1976

A special envelope, largely taken up with a map explaining the route of an Air France Concorde in April 1976 from Kuala Lumpur to Bahrain, seemingly via Colombo, Sri Lanka.

It appears that the supersonic bird had to carefully bend its route around Sumatra, the Indian Subcontinent, and Oman, but may have been able to cross the Emirates at Dubai.

Lufthansa/Privatair Flight No. LH588: Frankfurt->Libreville->Pointe-Noire

Here is the curious case of LH588: a 7 hour, 15 minute flight on board a wingleted B737-800 of Lufthansa-owned PrivatAir, from Frankfurt Airport to Libreville, Gabon, and then an onward hop of a little over an hour from Libreville to Augostinho Neto International Airport in Pointe-Noire, Congo Republic (which is also served by Air France non-stop from Paris). A seven hour journey aboard a single-isle plane may sound unbearable; but PrivatAir is all business class.

How does a major airline sustain an all-business class narrowbody, trans-equatorial service to two remote, sparsely-populated countries? Petroleum, of course.

Air France: The African Routes, 1977. Detail #1: East Africa & the Indian Ocean

Compared to the Western portion of the continent, where Air France was absent in 1977 and is quite present today, the Eastern half of Africa was much more thickly webbed by Hippodrome jets than it is today.

Air France does not even service Nairobi any more, but it was an important way-station between Europe and the former colonies of the Indian Ocean, with a stretching nonstop from CDG. Similarly, its amazing to see Djibouti as a massive hub, linked in a Cairo-Jeddah-Addis Ababa axis and also linked to the entire Francophone archipelago.

Other Anglophone cities that Air France has since abandoned include Dar Es Salaam and Entebbe (linked to Athens) as well as the Ethiopian capital. Links between Paris, Mauritius and Madagascar remain important today, but the native carriers of the region take a sizable share of the loads on their wide-body jets to Europe. Mahé is no longer an Air France destination, and Bujumbura and Kigali were also dropped, but still served from northwestern Europe by Brussels Airlines.

See previous post for other portion of this route map.

Air France: The African Routes, 1977.

In the wake of Air Afrique Week, it might be most fitting to spend the latter half of the month examining a bit more of those carriers who served West Africa during Air Afrique's existence and in the aftermath of its sad demise.

The first such example is one of the newest additions to the Timetablist collection, an Air France route map from 1977, when Air Afrique was in its prime, and Air France was just beginning to adopt its modern color scheme. Surprisingly, Air France completely defers to the West African carrier in the Gulf of Guinea region, only touching Dakar on the route to Rio de Janeiro. While the former dominions of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia in North Africa are thoroughly serviced, France's colonial heartland is left untouched.

The service table at the bottom details Air France's weekly frequencies to North and East Africa and the Indian Ocean islands, and helpfully charts the use of particular aircraft, even if its not entirely clear which Paris airport hosts which flight. The footnotes confirm that Air France relies on Air Afrique, Cameroon Airlines, and UTA for services from Paris to West and Central Africa, and that these airlines, along with Air Djibouti, Air Comores, and Air Madagascar operate intra-African and domestic networks.

The next post details the Eastern portion of the map.

Air France/KLM: African Network, Winter 2010/11: Codeshare destinations

Selected destinations served by Sky-team partner Kenya Airways in code-share are shown in red. Nairobi has become a significant hub for the alliance.

Air France/KLM: African Network, Winter 2010/11: Gulf of Guinea detail

The Air France-KLM's network in the Gulf of Guinea, serving every capital and major city from Abidjan to Luanda, is impressively dense and frequent.

Air France/KLM: Winter 2010/11

Air France-KLM's website currently features this extremely thoughtful network map for Sub-tropical Africa, with each city labelled with weekly frequencies, designated by carrier and hub. The otherwise-lucid graphic is a bit confusing, in that it includes only Libya among North African states, and even more confusingly does not include Djibouti or Madagascar--yet Air France is one of the few carriers to serve Antananarivo and Djibouti.

Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky: The international non-stops, Winter/Spring 2005

Five Years ago, Cincinnati was connected with four European capitals daily: London (Gatwick), Paris, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt, all by Delta Air Lines, which once operated one its largest hubs from the banks of the Ohio River.  Pre-SkyTeam Partner airline Air France often landed from CDG itself. In addition, Delta landed in Northern Kentucky from Cancun, Nassau, Montreal, and Toronto.

Today, only the Paris connection remains, although Cincinnati continues to be painfully squeezed between Delta's massive hubs in Atlanta and Detroit, as well as Memphis, also under pressure to shrink, and Minneapolis (the latter three inherited from Northwest). Meanwhile, Delta launched seasonal service from Pittsburgh to Paris, which continues to operate in the summer season, usually with a B757.