El Al: Boston to Tel Aviv Non-stop, June 2015

In just the last four years, starting in about 2012, Boston's Logan International Airport has seen one of the most astonishing periods of international traffic growth in the history of American aviation. In a startlingly compacts period of time, beginning with JAL's dreamliner service to Narita in April 2012, Logan's somewhat pedestrian terminal E has seen an astonishing addition of new tail fins—especially those running long- and ultra-long haul intercontinental flights from New England: Hainan, Emirates, Cathay Pacific, COPA, Aeromexico, Turkish, and WOW Air. These are now being joined by Norwegian, Qatar Airways, Eurowings, Air Berlin, SAS, Thomson Airways and TAP Air Portugal, in addition to new services by Jetblue, Logan's de facto hub airline. 

Last year, in mid-2015, El Al was a somewhat unlikely participant in this onrush. The Israeli flag carrier launched a thrice-weekly B767-300 non-stop to the Holy Land gateway, Ben Gurion International Airport. This print ad, boasting a beachy scene of Tel Aviv's skyscraper-studded riviera, featured in Boston magazine ahead of the first flight. Likely paid for by Massport as part of the incitement package offered to El Al to secure and support the service. Whatever the state agency has been doing, it's been doing it right. 

El Al: 3 times weekly to Boston, June 2015

Banner ads have started appearing for El Al's latest expansion into the United States market: thrice-weekly flights from Tel Aviv to Boston, beginning in June of this year.  El Al apparently served Logan Airport in previous decades, but it's return is part of the remarkable intercontinental expansion from Logan, which has seen the airport go from flights almost exclusively to Europe and Caribbean to non-stops to Tokyo on JAL, Beijing (and also in June Shanghai) on Hainan—these three all with the B787 Dreamliner,—as well as Emirates to Dubai, Turkish to Istanbul, and Cathay Pacific to Hong Kong, which begins in May. Copa Airlines recently started flights to Boston, and Aeromexico resumes non-stop flights to Mexico City starting in May as well.

Afternoon departures from Bahrain International, January 2015

The typical weekend afternoon schedule out of Bahrain's only commercial airport is dominated by flights operated by the state carrier, Gulf Air, and flights to the Middle East. Bahrain's flag carrier departs for Karachi, Delhi, Muscat, Riyadh, Dubai (twice), Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, and Dammam. Mahan Air flies to Mashhad, Saudia to Jeddah, and Egyptair to Cairo. Emirati low-cost carriers flydubai and Rotana jet fly to their respective hubs as well.

The only flight on the top of the board that doesn't fall into either or both categories is Cathay Pacific's non-stop to Hong Kong.

Cathay Pacific: Five Flights a Day to London Heathrow, June 2013

As a measure of London's supremacy over the rest of the UK economy, we jump ahead a quarter-century from the last post to see the Cathay Pacific of today, adding a fifth daily non-stop to London Heathrow, while at the same time abandoning Britain's other economic centers such as Manchester and Birmingham. The services are almost entirely with the behemoth B777-300, Cathay having retired the B747-400 from the route in December, and due to phase out the jumbo from its fleet entirely in September of this year.

Cathay Pacific: System Timetable, Winter 1989-90

It's hard to make out all the various cities in Cathay Pacific's network in the immediate years following the return of Hong Kong to China, but it is interesting to note that a non-stop to Manchester was added to the network for this 1989-90 winter, a route which does not exist today. Port Moresby was added to the route to Auckland, and network stretched into the Indian Ocean with a flight to Mauritius.  A single trans-Pacific service links San Francisco, via Vancouver.

Cathay Pacific: Systemwide Network, 1975

Another vintage gem from the incredible collection of Flickr user caribb, a relic from many decades ago, when the British crown's oriental outpost was home to but a small, regional carrier.

This Swire-green map with its thick, circular routes shows the diminutive extent of Cathay Pacific in that earlier era, the days when its green-striped L-1011s careened precariously off the apartment-blocked hills of Kowloon, skidding to a stop on Kai Tak's harbor-peninsula runway.

The map's loops of pesto-linguini link northeast Asia, mostly via Taipei, and southeast Asia, with two strands stretching south to Perth and Sydney. A unique distant chart is an unusual feature, interesting for navigational purposes, as this was many years before the first frequent flier programs.

Timetablist will be dedicating an intermediate period going forward to highlight some of the incredible finds of caribb's collection. Timetablist would like to thank caribb (Doug from Montreal) for generously allowing the reuse of these images under creative commons license terms.

Cathay Pacific Airways: Destinations from Kuala Lumpur, c. 1960

A much smaller carrier half a century ago, the green-stripped constellations of Cathay Pacific Airways spanned from India to Japan. It would be twenty years before the airline would acquire its first 747 and a quarter-century before the airline would cross the Pacific. Jesselton is now known as Kota Kinabalu.

Cathay Pacific Routes, 1980

Cathay Pacific is a supermajor today, with important European and Transpacific networks, so it is easy to forget that in late Imperial Times, CX was hardly to be seen outside of Asia. At the time these red lines were marked on this map, the farthest from Kowloon Bay that Cathay reached was a single stretch to Bahrain and Dubai from a scissors-station in Bangkok.

It would be another ten years from the publication of this map that the triple-mint stripe would appear in Europe at the West Coast. Note the number of intermediate stops, such as Taipei and Singapore- intraregional networks seem more common in East Asia even to this day. The direct flight to Port Moresby is also an interesting inclusion