Air Kiribati Network, c.2010

Air Kiribati, for all its loud color, operates but one route, linking the capital with Nadi, the international airport of Fiji. It is partnered with Our Airline, the dull name of the colorful former Air Nauru, which, much diminished from its glory days, manages an occasional run from Tarawa to Brisbane via the tiny island Republic and the Solomon Islands.

Air Nauru Network, c.2006

A sketchy .gif pixellation of the terminal Air Nauru system in 2006, its last year of operations, via this website. With a recently-leased B737-400, stretching at least occasionally as far as Manila and Melbourne (although not Hong Kong or Honolulu) and some sort of cooperative arrangement with Qantas (note how Sydney is bypassed), Air Nauru could almost be thought to have been re-peaking from to its previous glory days on the 1980s, when it was the great connecting carrier of the equatorial Pacific. Unfortunately, just mere months after this map was computer-drawn, the single jet was seized by Australian authorities at Melbourne over a tax dispute. Air Nauru was finished.

Air Nauru: Tenth Anniversary Stamps, 1980

The microscopic Republic of Nauru, with its mere few thousand citizens, has had few indigenous subjects for philately, so its little wonder that the national airline was featured at least once. Air Nauru was in its fully glory at aged ten, fueled by phosphate profits and stretching as far away as Auckland, Melbourne, and Hong Kong, but Japan and Honolulu.

Tarawa, Kiribati was just one of at least twenty Pacific islands that the Boeing B727 and B737 jets touched down on, from Guam to Fiji, Okinawa to Rarotonga, Noumea to Niue. Air Nauru was in many cases (such as Tarawa) one of the few, or only, scheduled services to link these far-flung atolls to the outside world.

The airline's fate sank with that of its nation, as Nauru declined from tiny, wealthy island republic to shady haven for tax cheats and Afghan refugees. The airline declined from a fleet of more than five aircraft to a single jet, which was seized by Australian authorities for unpaid taxes in December 2006.