Sudan Airways: 20th Anniversary Cover, December 1967

The Imperial Airways posts this week concluded back in the historic Sudan, colocating with this colorful Sudanese envelope from thirty years later. The tri-color celebratory cover itself offers the route map of Sudan Airways, with twelve destinations from London to Beirut to Nairobi shown in bright, wide red bands, while a dozen other airfields, mostly configured in a latitudinal axis from Fort Lamy to Jeddah to Aden, seem secondary in blue. There isn't a map legend to fully explain the distinction, however. 

A quadrant of dynamic scenes, the fleet of the state carrier, soars out of the more multicolored philately at top right: a DC-3 hums across a Nilotic sunset scene; beneath, a Fokker F-27 friendship as it rides over a purple landscape, a group of nomadic camel herders below. At lower right, all the superior speed of the flagship Comet 4C accelerates into rows of contrails, what seem to be the greens and blues of the very contours of the continents rush by in a blur. 

Imperial Airways Network, 1937: All Destinations

At the lower-left of the Imperial Airways route map, a round globe, the meridian region in front and daytime, the far east behind in the dark, shows, in simplified form, labelling each and every way station from Britain to South Africa and New South Wales. It is both so much clearer, and so much more complete, than the larger map, it is enough to wonder why the whole map was designed like this in the first place. 

Sudan Airways; The Domestic Network, April 1977

The second half of a fantastic prize of Flickr user caribb's incredible airline memorabilia collection: Sudan Airways "White Nile Intra-African and Regional Services" as of April 1977.

Showing a respectibly-dense network, including some regional connections in Darfur, Nubia, and South Sudan; yet all trans-national flights must connect via Khartoum.

As of 2011, although the livery was unchanged, the number of domestic destinations had been reduced to nine.

Please see previous post for international network.

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.