Kenya Airways: The Asian Network, April 2016

The eastward route map of Kenya Airways shows the airline's on-going presence across Asia, with nonstops to Dubai, Mumbai, and Bangkok with onward service to Hong Kong, and its newest service, to Guangzhou via Hanoi. At a time of highly-publicized, humiliating troubles for the airline, after a decade of ambitious growth and fleet renewal, it appears that KQ's Asian network is still going strong.

This portion of the map also provides some detail on the airline wide-range connections across the east African coast, from Djibouti to Dzaoudzi. Also visible is the airline's new route to Bangui, the development that started this series of posts.

The map also includes a large variety of codeshare operations, which, as this blog has argued recently, is seldom helpful in a complex route map. While oneWorld partner flights across Asia, connecting to Seoul on Korean or Shanghai on China Southern, are somewhat illustrative, the services to Australia on Etihad are particularly odd, as Kenya Airways does not serve Abu Dhabi (the airline ended flights there in 2014). The Nairobi—Mauritius—Perth trans-Indian Ocean link is interesting.

Imperial Airways, 1937: The African Routes

As with its trans-Asian operations shown yesterday, the technology available to Imperial Airways in the early age of aviation necessitated a series of regular way stations for the royal charter's southerly system spanning Africa.

After the upper Nile, the line made its way to Khartoum, whence it splits, with one line turning to the west: Kano—Lagos—Accra and finally Takoradi, which only has domestic links today. There must have been pitstops in the drylands of French Central Africa but these are unnamed here; the paths of the green routes, connecting Algeria and Morocco to Niger and then the Congo, and reaching across to Madagascar, suggest French operations.

Continuing to follow the Nile south, the Cairo-to-Cape line stopped at Malakal, toady in South Sudan, then fanned across British East Africa in a complex web which appears to shown that one set of services remained inland along the Great Rift, passing through Nairobi on the way to Lusaka, Salisbury (today Harare) and Bulawayo in Rhodesia, and  then finally ending at Johannesburg. 

Another schedule reached the Swahili coast at Mombasa—Dar Es Salaam—(Ma)lindi and coastal Mozambique, with a bridge connection through Nyasaland at Blantyre, passing through Lourenço Marques (today Maputo) to terminate at Durban. The unlabeled green lines with the Union clearly suggest an early-stage South African Airways, reaching both Cape Town and Windhoek. 

Kenya Airways Destinations, 2011

The back Kenya Airways boarding passes in mid-2011 boasted of that airline's expanding reach. An exhaustive array of African arrival points, from Cotonou and Monrovia in the West, to Bangui, N'Djamena and Libreville in Central Africa, to Ndola, Lubumbashi and Lilongwe to the south, as well as Indian ocean island airports such as Antananarivo, Mayotte and Seychelles added with Juba, Bujumbura, and Malindi in its own backyard. These and others are intermixed with an increasingly impressive index of intercontinental entrepôts, including Guangzhou and Muscat. The next posts records the remainder of the more than 40 cities arranged here.

East African Airways: The domestic network, c.1975

A compliment to yesterday's post from the same source, showing East African's "domestic" network to more than 20 destinations within Kenya, and Tanzania, along with a single connection to Entebbe-- strange that there is not a stronger regional network, even across Lake Victoria to Mwanza, nor even a connection to Dar Es Salaam. The links along the Swahili coast from Malindi to the Mtwara, at the border with Mozambique, are particularly comprehensive.

East African Airways: Domestic Routes, Summer 1974

At the height of its integration, the East African community's co-owned airline considered its routes within and between Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda as its "domestic" network. Note that Uganda had hardly any service, and that northern Kenya was also very underserved.

East African's operations were concentrated between Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam, with a large web of services up and down the coast from Lamu and Mombasa, to Zanzibar and Dar, to Kilwa and Mtwara. From Dar, a sizable domestic operation on mainland Tanzania linked Arusha (Kilimanjaro) and Dodoma to Mwanza on Lake Victoria.

This item has been reposted from the archives of Timetable Images, a wonderful website, which very graciously allows creative commons reuse of their collections. Special thanks to Björn Larsson.

Note that the previous post detailed the other imagery from this 1974 East African Airways brochure.