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. 

Air Afrique: Route Map Poster c.1962

The penultimate post for Air Afrique Week brings this polychrome poster showing the home ports of the consortium. Little information is available for this print, which was a lot in a New York vintage poster auction in February 2010. While the usual suspects of Air Afrique's destinations from Brazzaville to Bamako, Douala to Dakar, Freetown to Fort-Lamy are evident, this low-resolution preview doesn't reveal many of the details.

It seems that, near the crane-like yellow and blue bird straddling the Nigeria-Cameroon border are some mysterious destinations, and the oval inset map shows a zebra-stripe of trans-Saharan routes by the dozen, including what looks to be some very easterly swings, suggesting something like a Bangui-to-Budapest or Malabo-to-Moscow, which is fantasy.

The auction catalogue gives a date of 1950, but this is more than a decade before Air Afrique was incorporated. Perhaps, given the vintage, this was willful rather than a matter of record.

Air Afrique: West and Central Africa Timetable, mid-1973

After last week's posts on the post-independence carriers of the Republic of Gabon, Timetablist stays in the Gulf of Guinea region, clearing out the back catalogue with a week dedicated to Air Afrique.

The first item is a French language timetable from the early prime of the regional consortium, effective from March to October 1973, showing its weekly intra-African flights (translated into English, rather interestingly, as 'domestic' services). Air Afrique's renown gazelle & globe emblem is shown at top.

Services include certain routes of Royal Air Maroc (code AT) and Air Mauritanie (code MR), although it is noted at the bottom of the table that there is "no traffic rights" --perhaps, Air Afrique is unable to sell seats on the other carrier's routes included, but its not clear why these routes are then offered in the matrix. There are lots of cities excluded as well, key Air Afrique hubs, not least Abidjan but also Cotonou and Lomé.

Air France: Africa c. 1960

It looks as though Air France had even more routes and destinations in Africa than it does now-especially connections between the Francophone capitals. This route map is a bit difficult to decipher, with all the different colored points and lines not clearly explained. But it does appear, for instance, that Robertsfield at Monrovia, Liberia, was fully-served at the time, as was Nairobi on the way to Madagascar. Nouakchott is one of the few cities not shown here where Air France lands today.

Sabena: Brussels-Niamey-Leopoldville-Elisabethville

A gem of a relic, from 23 November 1935, features a detailed route map showing Sabena extending its reach into deepest Congo. The routing shows Brussels-Marsaille-Oran-Niamey-Fort Lamy (now N'Djamena, Chad)-Libenge (?)-Leopoldville (Kinshasa) and ending in Elisabethville, now Lubumbashi, in DR Congo's copperbelt region. No European carriers reach this city today. Note the gorgeous stamp, with a tiny motorcraft banking over the Palais de Justice in Brussels, an edifice built with the spoils of the Belgian Congo. Libenge, a small outpost on the Ubangi River, has no international service today, and is not listed on any Congo carriers' destination lists, such as Hewa Bora Airways.

United Arab Airlines, c. 1965

United Arab Airlines, which was a short-lived iteration of what is today Egyptair, had a strong network of African and Arabian Routes in its day, including several down the Nile and into East Africa, and a single, trans-Saharan span, with stops at Fort-Lamy, Kano, Lagos, and terminating at Accra. Accra and Lagos are served today, a major connection between the Middle East and West Africa. The exact date of this route map is unknown, but is obviously after the dissolution of the brief union with Syria.