Icelandair: Your way to Norway, 2011

Continuing to look at Icelandic air carriers in the 21st century, here is a magazine advert for Icelandair, specifically highlighting the airline's service to four Norwegian airports: Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, and Trondheim. The top of the page lists, in no particular order, Icelandair's 19 other European destinations from Glasgow to Alicante. That number has today nearly doubled above 35 cities, counting a number of seasonal services. 

Emirates Route Map, August 2016: Europe

A thick baobab trunk of routes juts up from Mesopotamia, spreading its boughs across the European continent. With a staggering 37 European destinations, Emirates has blanketed the region with flights even more so than any other portion of the globe, from Moscow to Manchester, Milan to Malta, Madrid to Munich. The depth of its reach is shown in secondary and tertiary markets: Prague, Budapest, Geneva, Lyon, Nice, Oslo, Glasgow, Bologna, and Hamburg are just a handful of third-tier cities which see a wide-body Emirates plane land daily, non-stop from Dubai.

SAS: The Worldwide Routes, 1960

In looking at the 21st century SAS, we can compare yesterday's subject to same airline at the height of its global reach. 

One the more regal route maps to ever grace the Timetablist, this magnificent, dynamic cartography exemplifies an earlier era the grandeur of the jet age is reflected in the eloquence of this graphic design. A so-called “spiral-polar projection,” which was “created especially for Scandinavian Airlines System to illustrate its worldwide routes,” are the only notations to the map. 

A quad-jet whisks its way into the high atmosphere, the might of its propulsion sweeps up the landmasses themselves, with far Siberia pulled away from the surface of the planet. The very latitudes of the global are twisted into the vortex of the jetliner's contrail. 

Upon the surface of these landmasses, thick red lines spread outward from Northern Europe to five continents. At the outer limits of the first generation jetliner's range, an impressive Oslo—Los Angeles was achieved, and lasted for decades, which as mentioned yesterday only came back in March 2016. Montreal and New York (the latter via Glasgow, it seems) were the only other North American destinations.

South America was, somewhat incredibly, more thoroughly covered, with the system's Lisbon—Recife—Rio de Janeiro—Sao Paulo—Montevideo—Buenos Aires—Santiago service. Africa was also served with a classic east African spine, Rome—Athens—Cairo—Khartoum—Nairobi—Johannesburg. None of these South American or African cities are served today. 

In addition to a half-dozen Near Eastern cities, SAS operated a trans-Asian trunk route to rival those of other European aviation pioneers, with a scissors-base at Karachi linking to Calcutta—Rangoon—Bangkok, which split to either Jakarta or onward to Manila—Tokyo, which swung northward to Anchorage to return to Copenhagen, here transgressing the print's nautilus-shell projection of the globe. 

Image via the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.

BOAC: The Speedbird Routes Across the World 1950: #2

Continuign from the previous post, the Speedbird Routes of BOAC touched a surprising number of non-Anglophone cities as they extended south from London to Casablanca, Port Etienne, then Bathurst, Freetown, Takoradi, Accra, and Lagos. A planned route would continue to Kano and cross the center of Africa to Khartoum, where the eastern line extends south to Nairobi and Johannesburg.

Less impressive than its African network are its trans-Atlantic routes, as just two left the home countries from Glasgow and Shannon, met again at Gander, and extended into North America to New York and Montreal. A single route from Baltimore linked Bermuda offshore.

American Airlines to Europe, 1999

This advert, inside an American timetable, embodies just the sort of timid, dated aesthetic that gives American Airlines its insipid, apprehensive reputation. Aimed squarely at its American customers (for who beyond US shores refers to "England"), the map wilts the page with its drippy, watercolor motif, perhaps meant to suggest the museum-hopping of a European vacation. American could not compete in Stockholm, and has since left. Several years ago it did dawn on American's executives, along with the rest of the corporate suites of the US legacy carriers, that high-margin international passengers were being handed off to foreign carriers at major hubs, while they concentrated on regional jets to Des Moines. It also helps that Southwest hasn't gone international, yet. Hence, American tried Moscow and Delhi, United is off to Bahrain, Lagos, and Accra, and Delta is touching down in every city that any other carrier in the world flies to, from Malabo to Melbourne to Montevideo to Malaga. Whether this is a new era of American aviation, in which hyperglobalization shifts the giants from 737s to Las Vegas and into 787s to Lahore, with less Nashville and more Nairobi, remains to be seen. Its an open question if US Carriers can compete on comfort and service with the Europeans, much less the Asian spas-in-the-sky. Delta seems to have had success on its Africa network, which has cut travel times from the East Coast, bypassing a connection in Paris or Amsterdam.

American Airlines Hub Maps, 2002: London

London has been American's pride of network since before it purchased TWA's Heathrow rights a decade before. This map is a bit deceptive, in that it shows a completely random spread of cities beyond Britain which have never been served by American, but seem to be OneWorld connections with British Airways or Gulf Air, from Teeside to Doha, Leeds to Muscat.

At the right are the US cities graced with a flagship nonstop, all of which enjoy the same privilege today, including Raleigh-Durham and the other complex hubs previously discussed. However, what is also deceiving about this graphic is that it does not specify which cities were crowned with Heathrow rights under Bermuda II rules and which had to shuffle into lowly Gatwick.

American Airlines Hub Maps, 2002: Chicago O'Hare

Chicago O'Hare serves both as American's upper midland superhub to ferry domestic passengers from one side of the continent to the other, as well as a premium business hub for origin-and-destination traffic: Tokyo is at upper-left; a vertical row of ten European non-stops are at upper-right. Honolulu is at far bottom left, a smattering of Mexican cities is served, but the farthest into the Caribbean basin is the non-stop to the San Juan complex: travelers to Latin America must connect through Dallas or Miami.

Icelandair System, 1999

Icelandair enjoyed a golden era as Iceland's economy boomed in the last ten years and Iceland became the hippest destination for European and American weekenders. This map shows the flag-carrier on the cusp of this period, which has since ended with the complete meltdown of the global finance, which hit Iceland as hard as any place.

Note the North American destinations: Minneapolis, Orlando, Baltimore, and Halifax-- Baltimore is sadly no longer a destination, and the other two are now seasonal. Icelandair is much more widespread in Europe, ten years on, making its own way to Helsinki, for instance. It also stretches to Seattle now, filling the gap which was created when SAS made the painful decision to withdraw its long-going Copenhagen service. Two Greenlandic cities are also marked in red, although these flights are often passed between Icelandair, Greenlandair, and Air Iceland.