National Airlines Network, c.1979

A great smile spreading from California to the Alps, National Airlines ran a boomerang-shaped network at the height of its operations. Multiple routes roped between regions like the strings of a guitar: A cluster of West Coast cities linked to the Deep South and Florida, where the network pivoted up the Eastern Seaboard to New York and Washington, or continued its arc across the Atlantic to five of Europe's largest gateways: London, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Zürich.

The map is unique in that one dot represents multiple airports within one metropolitan region: Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and Miami are together; Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota, and Fort Myers are one; Charleston/Savannah, New York/Newark, Mobile/Pensacola, and San Francisco/San Jose the same. Its difficult to discern the hubs of the network here, but it seems that Miami, New Orleans and Jacksonville were the keystones of this arch. For the latter two, this was truly a golden age, as neither has yet to regain non-stop transatlantic flights to multiple European cities.

Delta: New Orleans-London; National: New Orleans-Amsterdam

New Orleans apparently had a big year in 1978, when the deregulation bonanza seems to have brought the Crescent City two European routes: Delta to London (Gatwick) and National's DC-10 Sunjet non-stop to Amsterdam (connecting the world's two lowest-lying airports. What fun). Its only conjecture to say that it would have been half European tourists and have Shell oil personnel on board. Timetablist is unable to confirm whether the Delta flight was non-stop;might easily have been through Atlanta. By the following year, National had a sizable trans-atlantic presence, and appeared to serve Paris from New Orleans as well.

New Orleans was a significant node in Pan Am's connection from the Central US to the Caribbean and Central America, but that's all gone now. For a time pre-Katrina, the all that was left was a weekly TACA connection to Honduras, the occasional charter to Cancun. Also, British Airways did for a time serve The Big Easy on its way to Mexico City. The author of the Louis Armstrong Airport Wikipedia article summarizes this history quite nicely.