Interflug Timetable, Winter 1975-76, Part 1

The unscheduled discovery of this Interflug memorial website has gotten us sidetracked in reviewing its treasures. This post celebrates the first half of a photocopy-palletted schedule from November 1975 to March 1976 for routes within Europe and the Middle East, as well as the single transatlantic route, the historically curious twice-weekly Berlin—Gander—Havana service, which probably didn't ferry the freezing Newfoundlanders to sunny Cuba on the way. 

Other flights follow from previously-posted material of earlier years: one of the Iron Curtain spines in the latticework, the Berlin—Leipzig—Erfurt—Budapest—Tirana operation is shown at top, and below it one-off flights to the free world: Milan, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Vienna. Shown below is the all-important to Moscow and Leningrad. The largest box shows four weekly operations to the Near East: to Cairo, to Beirut, and Damascus—Baghdad. 

The next post shows the remaining pages of the schedule. 

Interflug Route Network, 1970

Double-checking some dates and details from the last post sent Timetablist to this website, with a treasure-trove of Interfluginalia, including this gracefully fluid route map, as the East German state carrier gently jets across the Second and Third Worlds.

The Warsaw pact capitals are well represented, such as Warsaw itself, but also including the smaller cities such as Tirana and Zagreb. Past the Iron Curtain, some non-aligned and socialist states of the Arab world are served, such as the Nicosia-Damascus-Baghdad route and the Cairo-Khartoum connection. The dashed lines and double-M metro sign perhaps indicate regional rail connections; secondary airports of the DDR, namely Dresden and Erfurt, are connected to Budapest, from whence it appears, reading the threading of the route lines correctly, that flights continue onward on the famous Algiers-Bamako-Conakry-Freetown journey. Almost everything else is out of Schönefeld.

Malev Hungarian Airlines: European Routes, c.1974

An adolescent, iron-curtain Malev commissioned a series of eye-watering route map postcards in the 1970s. The Northwestern European network is here, thick red lines and red dots fanning out from Ferihegy as far as London.

Each city is delightfully accompanied by picture-book illustrations of landmarks: a wintry scene down the Prinzengracht towards the Westerkerk marks Amsterdam; Schloß Schönnbrunn stands for Vienna; the Charles Bridge for Prague. A dull vista of office blocks represents Brussels in its pre-EU years; East Berlin is landmarked by modernist office block towering over an arrangement of flagpoles in a windswept plaza. What a completely gorgeous and delightful item.