Air Liban to Europe and Africa, c.1952

 Prior to becoming Middle East Airlines, the flag carrier of Lebanon was known as Air Liban. Formed in 1945, it quickly expanded across Southwest Asia, Europe and into Africa as reflected in the destination list on this vintage brochure: Near East destinations include Aleppo and Baghdad, and fourth city is listed Jerusalem—a somewhat remarkable historical phenomenon, although this likely references the old Atarot Airport, at the time located in the Jordanian-annexed West Bank. Regardless, "Jerusalem" makes its Timetablist debut here. 

Further into the Gulf extends a spine of Jeddah—Dhahran—Doha—Kuwait; it is important to realize that, long before the rise of thee Gulf super-carriers, MEA/Air Liban was the primary airline of the Arab World, as its expansive name implies. 

Looking Westward, Air Liban ran its "swift Super DC-6C planes" to Nicosia, Ankara, Istanbul and to its only Western European capital, Paris, while send a second route to Cairo and Tripoli, with its most southernly service across the Red Sea to Khartoum, then spanning the vast Sahara to reach Kano, Lagos, Accra, Abidjan, and finally terminating at Dakar. This unusual number of West African destinations linked the Syrian-Lebanese commercial diaspora of coastal urban West Africa to their homeland. 

Interflug Route Network, 1970

Double-checking some dates and details from the last post sent Timetablist to this website, with a treasure-trove of Interfluginalia, including this gracefully fluid route map, as the East German state carrier gently jets across the Second and Third Worlds.

The Warsaw pact capitals are well represented, such as Warsaw itself, but also including the smaller cities such as Tirana and Zagreb. Past the Iron Curtain, some non-aligned and socialist states of the Arab world are served, such as the Nicosia-Damascus-Baghdad route and the Cairo-Khartoum connection. The dashed lines and double-M metro sign perhaps indicate regional rail connections; secondary airports of the DDR, namely Dresden and Erfurt, are connected to Budapest, from whence it appears, reading the threading of the route lines correctly, that flights continue onward on the famous Algiers-Bamako-Conakry-Freetown journey. Almost everything else is out of Schönefeld.

Onurair: Now Connecting to Turkey, July 2015

 Just as yesterday's post debuted a secondary Turkish airline connecting at Istanbul, today consists of another inaugural feature on the Timetablist: an advertisement of Onurair, yet another Kemalist carrier with a bland name and even more generic red logo. Marketed to hurried passengers at the tiny passenger terminal at Tegel Airport in Berlin, the poster excites the European traveler who wishes to reach Asia Minor—from large tourism gateways like Izmir, Bodrum and Antalya to more minor Anatolian destinations like Diyarbakir, Kayseri, and Gaziantep, all, apparently via Atatürk Airport. The journey can originate from major European hubs like Amsterdam and Berlin or secondary cities such as Stuttgart and Düsseldorf, to more obscure links such as Odessa and Nicosia. 

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. 

BOAC: Addis Ababa to London, January 1973

The holder of this envelope can almost hear the roar of BOAC's super VC-10s quad engines as the airliner touches down for the first time at Bole Airport in early January1973. The gorgeous illustration, set at a dynamic perspective, dominates this stately and information-backed first flight cover.

BOAC's classic, dashing speed bird emblem appears several times, most notably at the header of the paragraph-long Official Flight Endorsement which provides exacting detail on the itinerary of this piece of paper from Heathrow to Addis Ababa and back, although it is elsewhere, at far right, that the intermediate stops: Nicosia and Cairo, the latter categorized, curiously, as "unscheduled."

More space, if not heavier ink, is given over to the regal Lion of Judah, symbol of the Ethiopian monarch and not dissimilar from Queen Elizabeth's heraldic menagerie.

United Arab Airlines, c. 1965

United Arab Airlines, which was a short-lived iteration of what is today Egyptair, had a strong network of African and Arabian Routes in its day, including several down the Nile and into East Africa, and a single, trans-Saharan span, with stops at Fort-Lamy, Kano, Lagos, and terminating at Accra. Accra and Lagos are served today, a major connection between the Middle East and West Africa. The exact date of this route map is unknown, but is obviously after the dissolution of the brief union with Syria.