Air Zaïre: Timetable of Services from Kinshasa, 1977

The services of Air Zaïre from its home base at N'Djili Airport near Kinshasa was indexed in this straightforward timetable from 1977.

Weekly routes spread across West, Central and Eastern Africa, Dakar to Douala to Dar Es Salaam, mostly with B737s. Domestic destinations were also served with a pair of Boeing 737 jets or Fokker F-27 Friendship turboprops. A number of connections to the Great Lakes region connected in Kisangani Bangoka International Airport (FKI) or Lisala (LIQ), birthplace of the country's kleptocratic despot, Mobutu Sese Seko.

Northward routes reached Europe with two widebody DC-10s, the flagships of the fleet. While its no surprise that the airline connected Kinshasa to Brussels thrice-weekly, it is somewhat more remarkable that a Wednesday morning departure arrived in Athens later in the evening--an uncommon destination from equatorial Africa nowadays.

The above is part of the collection of Björn Larsson, and is reposted under the generous privileges of the fantastic Timetable Images website.

The next post will detail the second portion of Air Zaïre's 1977 timetable.

Hewa Bora Airways Network, c.2009

Air travel is essential in the Congo, a country the size of Western Europe with fewer than 3,000km of paved roads. Despite this necessity, and although it is estimated to be home to a population larger than Germany, the war-scarred, impoverished nation has very few consumers of air transport. The country has not had a consistent candidate for national carrier since the days of Air Zaïre. In the decade since the switch from Zaïre to the Democratic Republic of Congo, this mantle has been held aloft on the wings of the curiously-named Hewa Bora Airways (Swahili for "Fresh Air").

HBA flies a mixed fleet, mostly MD-82s, across the massive equatorial state, connecting the major cities and economic centers (Lubumbashi of copper, Mbuji Mayi of diamonds, Goma of tantalum) of this well-endowed territory with its sprawling capital, Kinshasa. Kisangani, the city of Stanley Falls, is linked with Goma, capital of the great lakes region in the far east. According to the airline's website, a number of new domestic destinations have come into the fold since this map was drawn, as well as Entebbe.

Hewa Bora also hops from N'Djili airport across the mile-wide Congo River to the neighboring Congolese capital of Brazzaville on the opposite shore. Johannesburg is reached via the Katangan copperbelt conurbation of Lubumbashi.

The map shows a reach to northerly latitudes linking the world's other large francophone capitals, Paris via Brussels-- although there is no record of this occurring, and HBA has long been on EU's list of banned carriers, as are all airlines domiciled in the DRC.