Sabena: Mexico City, Montreal, and New York aboard Caravelle Jets, c.1960s

 Flying to Mexico City in another era: here's an old Newspaper advertisement in a shipping circular, in which the Belgian airline Sabena boasts of "the best trips with the Latest Jets, Excellent Service, Luxury & Comfort To Europe" on board both Caravelle Jets and Boeing Jets, with the porpoise-nosed Caravelle shown. The three North American destinations shown: Montreal, New York, and Mexico City, correspond to this artifact posted several years ago, showing the airline's route system from Europe to Africa, the Near East in North America. 

Aeromexico: The North American Routes, December 2015

 Continuing from the previous post, a second map from Aeromexico's in-flight magazine at the end of 2015, showing the airline's array of flights from seven cities to its NAFTA partners. 

Although Aeromexico serves 18 cities in los Estados Unidos, this is perhaps fewer than might be guessed; it is fewer U.S. airports than British Airways to London, for instance. Most flights originate in Mexico City, with a handful fanning out from the northern economic powerhouse of Monterrey—which will be the subject of the subsequent post. There are a few flights out of the country's second largest city: Guadalajara, but surprising only one flight from Cancún, Mexico's second busiest airport, to New York; today the route is flown only by Delta and American Airlines. While Avianca and COPA fly to several Florida cities such as Ft. Lauderdale and Tampa, Aeromexico only served Orlando and Miami, and the Merida flight has been discontinued. The flight to Denver is now year-round. The flight from Morelia, in Michoacán, to Chicago-O'Hare is still flying seasonally. The Boston flight, which commenced in June of that year, has sadly since been discontinued.

There is a more significant cluster of flights up to (Alto) California, including to less commonly-served airports such as Sacramento, Ontario, and Fresno—which are all premiering on The Timetablist with this post. The Guadalajara—Fresno link is especially notable as the San Joaquin Valley metro has no direct flights to domestic cities such as New York, Washington, or Houston.  Los Angeles has links to four cities. 

The three largest airports of Canada are connected to Benito Juarez; the flight to Vancouver has been an apparent success. 

Athens Airport Departure Board, 19 August 2017 (2)

Continuing from the previous post, the departures leading to the noon hour shown on a second screen at Athens International Airport on 19 August 2017. Since the demise of Olympic Airways as a six-continent carrier, the number of intercontinental flights out of Athens is not what it once was, but here we see several of the current long-hauls, with two flights at 11:30 to Asia, low-cost Dreamliner operation Scoot to Singapore, and Air China's triangular routing to Beijing via Munich. 

In the other direction, a quarter hour later American's summer non-stop to Philadelphia is already preparing for boarding, while Air Canada leaves for Montreal at noon, a seasonal, tri-weekly flight filled by the many Greek-Canadians who come back to their ancestral homeland. The only other true flag carrier on the board is Middle East Airlines 11:15 hop to Beirut. 

Other than European budget operations like Germania, the time block contains the usual smattering of domestic island services on Aegean—almost all operated by Dash-8 props of its subsidiary Olympic, as noted by the "A3 7" flight numbers—to Alexandropolis, Paros, Santorini, and Leros. Smaller domestic enterprises Sky Express to Chios and Astra to Mitlini (Mytlene) on Lesbos. 

 

Royal Air Maroc: Casablanca—Washington, September 2016

As Tunisair and Air Algérie spread their wings across the Atlantic, the mega-carrier of northwestern Africa, Royal Air Maroc, continues to outpace them. Already long-present in both Montreal and New York, the state carrier of Morocco recently added a third North American service on-board its sleek fleet of new Dreamliners: Washington Dulles. The Casablanca-IAD flights, launched in September, are shown advertised here on a billboard near the Anfa Mall. 

Air Algérie: Montréal-Algiers, March 2017

It seems the management of flag carriers across North Africa have similar strategy forecasts: within months of Tunisair announcing their first-ever long-haul, trans-Atlantic service to Montreal, the state airline of Algeria, Air Algérie, followed suit, with an identical aircraft. Luckily, Montreal's enormous francophone immigrant communities hail not just from North Africa but across the French-speaking states of the continent, so there is likely plenty of demand. For a brief period of time earlier this year, the airline had also planned a non-stop between Oran and Montreal, but this was scrapped in favor of increased frequencies from Algiers only. 

Tunisair: Tunis to Montreal, June-September 2017

As mentioned in the first two posts from this month, Tunisair has finally undertaken a long-contemplated long-haul expansion. It's first intercontinental destination on a pristine new A330-200 was Montreal, launching thrice-weekly, summer seasonal service in 2016 which repeats this year starting next month.

Montreal, one of the world's largest French-speaking cities, has sizable and affluent francophone immigrant communities, not just from North Africa but West Africa as well. Royal Air Maroc has long served the French-speaking Canadian metropolis, and Air Algerie followed Tunisair's lead recently as well.

Tunisair Network, Early 2017

Tiny Tunisair is growing. Now extending to four continents, with extensive connections to metropolitan France (Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, Nice, Toulouse) as part of more than two-dozen European destinations, including third-level cities like Belgrade and Düsseldorf. 

The Western Africa network is not as extensive as other carriers, but Tunis is now connected to seven francophone sub-Saharan capitals, from Nouakchott to Niamey. Three routes to the Middle East are sustained: Beirut, Jeddah and Medina, which is misplaced on this otherwise straightforward graphic representation. Not every venture has met with success, as the airline's flights to Dubai were scrapped, as has been previously reported here. 

Pride of the carrier is the airline's most distant service: the year-old long-haul link to Montreal, Tunisair's first wide-body, trans-Atlantic operation. 

Qatar Airways Route Network, November 2016: North America

As with other continents and corners of the globe, Qatar Airways has differentiated itself from its Gulf rival Emirates but reaching cities not served by the Dubai-based megacarrier. Of the 11 North American destinations, four of them: Montreal, Miami, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, are not served by Emirates. Philadelphia and Miami can be explained primary due to Qatar's partnership with American Airlines through the oneWorld alliance, although this is increasingly under strain.

Qatar just celebrated 5 years in Montreal, which sees carriers from across the near Arab world, including Royal Jordanian, Royal Air Maroc, Air Algerie and Tunisair, as the city is a major destination for global migrant,s especially from the francophone world. Atlanta was an interesting choice for Qatar's tenth U.S. city, a destination made not in cooperation with, but more in spite of hometown Delta Air Lines. 

Conversely, it is interesting to see that Qatar is absent from such primary gateways as San Francisco and Toronto. 

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.

ČSA Czechoslovak Airlines: The IL-62 Services, c.1970

A final item for ČSA Czechoslovak Airlines in its Soviet era: a route map specifically for its flagship IL-62 quadjet, which roared its way from Moscow to Montreal; JFK to Jakarta. The precise date of the item is unknown but the carrier still operated its west African route, although here it is curiously shown as stopping in Rabat instead of Casablanca on its Prague—Algiers—Dakar—Freetown schedule. The trans-Asian service is by now familiar, stopping in Athens, then splitting between Tehran and Cairo—Kuwait before scissoring at Bombay to link Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Jakarta. 

The three transatlantic cities are shown as well, with Brussels and Amsterdam as way stations to North America. The superjet also whisked apparatchiks domestically, the only IL-62 service from Bratislava was back to Prague. 

ČSA Czechoslovak Airlines Route Map, 1982

Keeping with the history of Czechoslovak Airlines, we return to the amazing album of  Flickr user Caribb's incredible collection, this photo showing the route map of ČSA in a similar arrangement to the previous set of posts.

While still a pinwheel arrangement with Prague as its central hub, the network appears on a red field rather than concentric orbs. Long-haul routes are sparser than the previous decade: IL-62s still cross the Atlantic to New York, Montreal, Havana, (the timetable of which we covered years ago in an early post) and there are still trans-Asia flights reaching to Hanoi, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore via Bombay or through Athens are all the same, but Ho Chi Minh City and Jakarta are out.

The Kuwait—Abu Dhabi schedule operates via Cairo. North Africa still well represented with Algiers, Casablanca, and Tunis—Tripoli.

One of the other shots Caribb has in his online gallery is a plan of the IL-62, which curiously show smoking and non-smoking sections adjacent to each other for the entire length of the cabin.

Bratislava again appears in the upper-right, with a few Eastern bloc international connections and domestic routes in dark ink.

As it has so many times in the past, Timetablist would like to express its appreciation for Flickr user caribb (Doug from Montreal)'s incredible collection, and to say thanks  for allowing the reuse of these images under creative commons.

ČSA Czechoslovak Airlines Route Map, c.1975

In the hundreds of Timetablist posts in almost seven years, there have been few works of such cartographic styling as original and dynamic as this Czechoslovak Airlines route map from some time in the mid-1970s. It's pinwheel arrangement and radial design partly recall the famous Lufthansa Streckenatlas from the 1970s, and its disregard for distance recalls a contemporary Thai Airways route map. As this magnificent bullseye covers the entire globe, it will be discussed through a series of posts.

Radiating out from Prague with dissipating intensity, a pattern of straight-line routes connect four continents. Cities are arranged roughly by cardinal direction, but great liberties are taken with specific location. The innermost, darkest ring covers central Europe, while a robins-egg disc demarcates the edges of Eurasia, from London to Larnaca. The faintest, outer orb, bulging at the middle in an almost hyper-elliptical projection, is even less rigidly adherent to true geography, with Dubai, Jakarta and Montreal equidistant. 

What is perhaps most fascinating in terms of aviation history is the extraordinary extent of CSA's global reach, from Havana to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

There was a major waystation in Bombay,connecting directly from Prague and via Athens, Damascus, Larnaca and Beirut, with onward services to Jakarta, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and Singapore. Kuwait and Abu Dhabi have a dedicated service from Prague, shown at sharp 3 o'clock. Note that the Cairo-Dubai operation is shown at 5 o'clock, for an extreme example of geometry over geolocation.

What is rather staggering to consider is that just one of these cities is served by Czech Airlines today.  CSA has no transatlantic routes, and flies no further than Dubai in Asia. While the late Iron-bloc regime in Prague may have had geopolitical agendas for such an expansive operation, it is still astonishing that a larger, wealthier home base can no longer support such a wide variety of long-haul services.

Swissair: The Intercontinental Routes, Winter 1972

The five-continent network of d stretched from Santiago to Singapore, Montreal to Manila. Four cities in North America, four in South America, three in South Asia, and five in East Asia were connected with what here is simply denoted as "Switzerland" sitting at the center of Europe, whether Zürich or Geneva is not specified. The only other European cities marked are Athens and Istanbul. A denser array in the Near East: Ankara, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Nicosia, Tehran, and Tel-Aviv.

A special thanks to Flickr user caribb (Doug from Montreal) for the fair-use rights.

The particularly-strong African network will be featured in the following post. 

Sabena: Belgian World Airlines, 1973

Continuing with the vintage global route maps of European airlines from Flickr user Caribb's incredible collection, this (unfortunately somewhat blurry) photo shows Sabena's system in its “Belgian World Airlines” prime (compare to “Italy's World Airline” in the previous posts).

Five continents are linked, which is more than today's Brussels Airlines can boast, as that airline has only recently reached New York and Washington, but as with today's successor, the flag carrier of Belgium was mostly concerned with flights within Europe and Africa. As with this week's Alitalia posts, the latter African flights will be examined in detail in a subsequent post.

For now, this pink-and-grey sub polar projection shows just a few routes to Asia and the Americas, interspersed with far too much detail of "other airlines" connecting services, which overall makes Sabena's network look much more comprehensive and makes the map much too complicated to read easily.

In North America, only New York and Montreal are served, with the latter flight continuing on to Mexico City and terminating, quite unusually, at Guatemala City. Late-terminal Sabena would serve a number of U.S. cities from Boston to Miami in the 1990s before its ignominious 2001 demise.

Further into Latin America, the South American cone is connected on a Brussels-Dakar-Buenos Aires-Santiago service, which, while definitely not the only Dakar-South America operation in aviation history, may be one of the few situations in situation that West Africa had a scheduled link with Argentina, as most such flights link to Brazil.

Looking east, Sabena maintained sizable bases in both Vienna and Athens, with flights from both cities non-stop to East and Southern Africa as well as the Near East, such as Nicosia. Moving across the Asian landmass, flights first stopped in Tehran, then Bombay, Bangkok and Singapore were all interconnected, before the network curved up through Manila to reach Tokyo, from whence Sabena curved back over the pole to return to Brussels via Anchorage, Alaska.

The extensive African network will be detailed in the following post.

Special thanks, as always, to Flickr user Caribb (Doug from Montreal) for the generous creative commons licensing which permits reposting of his collection. 

Royal Air Maroc Network, November 1983

The state carrier of the Kingdom of Morocco has always had a uniquely-diverse network, with a strong presence in its home region of North and Western Africa, a dense array of flights across Western Europe, and a handful of long-range services overseas.

This is only more so today, but thirty years ago Royal Air Maroc already offered flights to half a dozen West African capitals, as far south as Libreville. All of them francophone except for tiny Malabo.

Francophonia features prominently across the network, linking seven cities in metropolitan France, from tiny Lille to Toulouse and Bordeaux. Much father afield, one of longest flights is to Montreal via New York, a route which the airline still serves today.

Interestingly, South America was also reached, with a single flight connecting Rio and Sao Paulo. At the eastern end of its extent, RAM's jets found their way to Damascus, Kuwait, and several other cities in the Middle East.

In this blood orange graphic (the larger background is a sunset photo), the Montreal-New York-Casablanca-Cairo-Jeddah route is emphasized in bold, for reasons unclear.

This image was derived from a post on Royal Air Maroc page of the encyclopedic Timetable Images blog. 

Air Algerie Timetable, 2012-13

From the printed winter Timetable of Air Algérie showing service to four continents. The list indexes  departures from the hub at Algiers to European cities like Madrid, London, Istanbul, Frankfurt, Milan and Moscow, and is particularly heavy with French cities such as Lille, Metz, Lyon, Nice, and Marseille, in addition to both the airports of Paris (virtually the only quotidien flights shown on the schedule).

Air Algérie serves most francophone West African capitals at least once per week. Here, the infrequent trans-Saharan services to Nouakchott, Niamey, and Ouagadougou are listed, as are the airline's long-haul, thrice-weekly flights to Montreal, and Dubai, and the twice-weekly service to Beijing, reflecting its global ambitions.

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.

CP Air: Worldwide Network, c.1983

The wonderfully random route network of Canadian Pacific Airlines in its classic CP Air age, when it was the airborne division of Canada's premier transport companies but not able to fly it's premier international routes. A unique collection of flights fan out to four other continents, two across the Pacific: Vancouver—Tokyo—Hong Kong and Vancouver—Honolulu—Nadi—Sydney, and one venturing south to the cone of Latin America: Mexico City—Lima—Santiago—Buenos Aires.

From the Alberta prairie, a transpolar route links Edmonton to Amsterdam, linking to a Rome—Athens route. A second trans-Atlantic flight from Montreal lands at Amsterdam, while a third European route also starts in Montreal, but leaps southward to Santa Maria in the Azores, then to Lisbon, Madrid, and connecting again at Rome. Paris and London are absent.

Mexicana: The Americas Unified, 1993

Mexicana boasted of its pan-American network in 1993: stretching from Santiago to San Francisco, Caracas to Chicago, Montreal to (not quite) Montevideo. As with Eastern Air Lines, it's interesting that there are no Brazilian routes: Buenos Aires is the farthest down the cone that Mexicana reached. The inclusion of secondary cities such as San Jose, California, San Antonio and Denver is interesting, compared to the absence of larger airports such as Houston, Dallas, and Washington. There are also only three capitals of Central America in the network: Guatemala, Panama, and San Jose de Costa Rica.

CP Air: Worldwide Routes, October 1978

The incredibly complex connectivity of the classic Canadian Pacific Air Lines route network in October 1978 is shown here in this blazoning vintage advert. Then operating as CP Air, the aviation arm of the Canadian conglomerate offered passenger services to 14 international airports on five continents from no less than five separate gateways across Canada.

Particularly key was the European gateway of Amsterdam, which lined to four Canadian cities: Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg and Toronto, although somewhat oddly not its primary airport, Vancouver. CP Air jets also departed Toronto for Milan, and Rome, with onward service to Athens from both Rome and Amsterdam. Rome and Lisbon, but not Amsterdam, were served from Montreal, which also enjoyed service to Mexico City. Toronto was also linked to Mexico City as well as Acapulco and Lima. Whether the continuing service from Lima to Santiago, finally terminating at Buenos Aires, were originally from Toronto or Vancouver is unclear.

CP Air also connected all its international gateways, except Montreal, to Honolulu, from whence it plunged far south to Antipodea. CP Air's Pacific operations, shown above, will be detailed in the following post.