Emirates: Dubai to (the wrong) Panama City, August 2015

Back when Emirates first announced the world's newest-longest flight, non-stop between Dubai and Panama, in August 2015, it was major news, both due to the length of the flight plan itself and the slightly unusual destination. Although Panama is the hub for COPA airlines and therefore a significant aviation crossroads for Latin America, Emirates has no formal feeder arrangement in place with the Panamanian airline previously, and also bypassed larger cities and airports, most notably Mexico City. 

The news made Bloomberg, although a sub-sub at the graphics department missed the memo about which Panama City was being connected; here clearly showing the Spring Break version, in the panhandle of Florida, lit in yellow. Oops. 

An additional oops has been the heavily-delayed roll-out of the flight, first set for early 2016, it is now expected sometime in the first half of 2017, but has yet to declare a specific date for the inaugural flight. In the meantime, the airline has boldly expanded in Florida, adding Orlando in late 2015 and most recently Fort Lauderdale, but not, however, Panama City. But, you ever know with Emirates.  

Emirates Route Map, August 2016: The American Routes

Yesterday's post introduced the latest Emirates route map, with its gorgeously-tessalated, neo-Fullerian projection. Left off that first post was this second page, showing the Americas exclusively (and a large swath of the southeast Pacific, interestingly). 

Emirates increasing number of routes to North America are some of the longest commercial flights in the world, especially the ultra-long haul Dubai—San Francisco and Dubai—Los Angeles runs, whose twice daily A380 services are scheduled in at a staggering 16 hours 15 minutes, currently the world's sixth longest non-stop flight, followed by Dubai—Houston, which is ninth. Dubai—Dallas is 17th, and Dubai—Fort Lauderdale is 24th, and Dubai—Orlando is 28th. 

Even though it doesn't rank as highly, the Sao Paulo non-stops generally top 15 hours, the Buenos Aires link an even longer haul. Indeed, the shortest route on this map is the controversial fifth-freedom Milan—New York JFK service. 

While Emirates continues to add U.S. gateways (as was discussed in posts earlier this month), it is interesting to note that several large cities have yet to be reached, particularly Mexico City but also Vancouver and Montreal (which is served by Qatar and Turkish Airlines). Miami was recently bypassed for Ft. Lauderdale, a curious development in American intercontinental aviation which has been covered extensively earlier this month.

The map does include the Dubai—Panama route, which at 17.5 hours would soar in the rankings of ultra-long haul services. However, this launch has been delayed for almost a year and the exact start date has not been set, it is both drawn on the system and featured in the box at lower right, which also announces the start of flights to Bologna and Bamako—the table itself an index of the extraordinary breadth and growth of this behemoth airline. 

El Al: 3 times weekly to Boston, June 2015

Banner ads have started appearing for El Al's latest expansion into the United States market: thrice-weekly flights from Tel Aviv to Boston, beginning in June of this year.  El Al apparently served Logan Airport in previous decades, but it's return is part of the remarkable intercontinental expansion from Logan, which has seen the airport go from flights almost exclusively to Europe and Caribbean to non-stops to Tokyo on JAL, Beijing (and also in June Shanghai) on Hainan—these three all with the B787 Dreamliner,—as well as Emirates to Dubai, Turkish to Istanbul, and Cathay Pacific to Hong Kong, which begins in May. Copa Airlines recently started flights to Boston, and Aeromexico resumes non-stop flights to Mexico City starting in May as well.

SAHSA Route Network, 1993

A luscious example of SAHSA's advertising artistry was shown in the middle of last year, but the posts moved on before this equally elegant and attractive example could be featured: an almost railroad-like vine of routes creeps out from a central spine, showing a respectable reach for such a small carrier. Tegucigalpa, the presumed hub, is shown off the the side, completely off-center, below it are the cities of the isthmus, ending at Panama. The broader boughs of the trees, spinning off the top of the network like the kicking legs of a triskelion, are the American gateways: Houston, New Orleans, and Miami, with the Caribbean stops just below, surprisingly including Grand Cayman but also the domestic destinations of Roatan, La Ceiba, and San Pedro Sula—these may had international routes as well. Guatemala City and San Salvador branch off to the far right.

A gorgeous mural of the attractions of SAHSA's network lies at the ad's base, from the skyline of Houston, the icons of Disney World and a Gone with the Wind Antebellum scene at left, to the Mayan temples of Mesoamerica at center, to the fun and sun of the warm Caribbean, a merchant ship navigating the Panama Canal at upper right.

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.

Eastern Airlines: the South American Route System, August 1982

A dreamy, pencil-sketch styled route Map from the pre-digital era adorned the back section of Eastern Airlines in-flight magazine in August 1982. This excerpt detailed the airline's famed Latin American Routes, which fanned out from New York and Miami, following a predominant Andean spine, with busy interconnections between bases in Panama City, Bogota, Quito, Guayaquil, and Lima, thinning out toward Santiago and Buenos Aires. Astonishingly, there were apparently no routes to Venezuela, or to the huge cities of Brazil. The route map shows connections through Miami to Washington, Houston and Los Angeles, and a single non-stop from New Orleans to Panama City. 

VARIG: South American Network, 1973

Brazil dominates commercial aviation in South America today, but four decades ago Rio de Janeiro was the primary gateway to the continent's southern cone, with Sao Paulo just another way station on the routes to Asuncion and Santiago, without, apparently so much as a link to Montevideo and Buenos Aires, at least not on VARIG. Manaus is a more important gateway, with connections to Bogota and Mexico City via Panama, as well as an Andean-hopper terminating at Iquitos, Peru. Recife and Salvador, and Belem all have flights into Europe, with the latter also linked to Cayenne and Paramaraibo, as well as Miami.

See the previous post for the global view of the VARIG route map of 1973. 

SAHSA Route Network, 1993

One of the member carriers of Grupo TACA is the International Airline of Honduras, SAHSA, shown here in a lucid advertisement from late in its independent life. There are as many routes out of the Honduran resort of San Pedro Sula and the Belizean cities as there are from the capital, Tegucigalpa. Houston, New Orleans, and Miami are the US gateways, and the airline flew as far south as Panama. Interestingly, there is no service to Mexico City or Cancún, although there was a flight from the Caribbean resort town of La Ceiba to tiny, Anglophone Grand Cayman. This service, along with flights to New Orleans, did not survive the rebranding into TACA.

Aviateca Timetable and Route Map, June 1993

Continuing with our posts on service between the US and Latin America, this twenty-year old artifact of Mesoamerican aviation is presented: a full intra-American flight schedule and route map for Guatemalan state carrier Aviateca in its Late Post-Classic phase, just prior to be absorbed into the fold of Grupo TACA of neighboring El Salvador.

The schedule stretches from Chicago to Panama, as does the small map at the lower right, showing a web of routes out of Guatemala City, including an unusual route to New Orleans, which would later be rerouted to Honduras after it taken over by TACA. Unfortunately, like the airline that committed to it, the route has not survived to the present day, and New Orleans' role as a primary gateway from the Midwest to Middle America is a distant memory. But here, there is also some sort of connecting service between Louisiana and Houston, which also links with Merida, in the middle of the Yucatan. Aside from its base of operations at La Aurora, the airline held a mini-hub at Flores, gateway to Tikal in the northern Peten department, links to Cancún and Belize. In a sense, Aviateca was the airline of the Mundo Maya, even in the mid-1990s. Yet the Quetzalcoatl was not to survive as its own fleet, becoming one of the five macaws of Grupo Taca just a few years after the publication of this pamphlet.

COPA: Non-stop from Boston to Panama City, Summer 2013

Latin America is possible starting this month from Boston Logan Airport, as Panamanian carrier COPA lands in New England for the first time. In the build-up to the launch, the airline has been blanketing local media with its adverts, such as the glossy, full-color spread in a recent issue of Boston Magazine, showing the glowing panorama of Medellin, Colombia, or the less vivid, but no less eye-catching view towards Sugar Loaf in Rio de Janeiro. Apparently, the airline sees their home hub of Panama as more of a transit point than a destination.

This is the first Latin American airline to service Boston Logan since the unsuccessful attempts in the previous decade by TACA to serve San Salvador, and Aeromexico to offer a non-stop to Mexico City.

VARIG: Worldwide Network, c.1975

This undersized image file is a bit difficult to read, but is yet an informative mid-1970s route map of the Brazilian carrier VARIG. A conventional wall map overlaid with red route lines makes for an unoriginal and underwhelming document, but it even in its somewhat dull and diminutive format reveals some interesting information, especially the concentration of routes from Rio de Janeiro, whereas since this era the aviation action has decidedly shifted south to São Paulo.

Long trans-equatorial non stops to Miami and New York are juxtaposed with multistop zigzags such as Rio-Recife-Madrid-Rome-Tel Aviv or Rio-Recife-Paris-Frankfurt/London. The return journey from Iberia stops at Robertsfield, Monrovia-- the only African destination and location for a fatal 1967 VARIG crash on such a route. An Andean mini hub at Lima leads to jags up Mesoamerica, from Panama to Los Angeles.

There seem to be no routes out of Manaus or Brasilia, but this is a classic trap of cartography of this style, where it is hard to discern, especially from a distance, if a route is merely passing over a dot on a map, or pit stopping.

Air Panama Timetable, April to October 1985

A one-page, one-color timetable from Air Panama Internacional, midyear 1985. Mutliweekly flights connected Panama City with Bogata, Caracas, Guayaquil, Lima, and Mexico City. Nonstop service ran daily between Tocumen International Airport and Miami. According to the Wikipedia entry, Air Panama reached as far as New York's JFK, as well as Guatemala City, with a variety of aircraft, including the DC-10 and B757, prior to its demise at the time of the American invasion of Panama in 1989.

USAirways: Ft. Lauderdale Hub, 2004

USAirways established a Caribbean basin hub in the middle of the last decade, but apparently it didn't last. Sort of a shame, and a bit unexpected in that USAirways, like other legacy carriers, has been looking to international traffic for revenue growth recently, evident in USAirway's services from Belize to Rio from its Charlotte hub, which much offer more traffic and profits.

Iberia: Western Hemisphere, February 2006

Iberia's Western Hemisphere routes in early 2006 showing, to a fault, its reliance on American Airlines to compliment its transatlantic system, particularly the radiating spokes out of Miami and Chicago. Its surprising that Iberia does not have more US destinations: nothing on the west coast, no service to Washington. Service to Boston's Logan airport has commenced since this time. Its Latin American links are proficient, but not over-abundant.

Over all, this cartography suffers from an extreme over-inclusiveness of code-share routes from American Airlines. This is further complicated by Iberia's historic base at Miami, which facilitated onward connections in Latin America. Its hard to discern among all these red lines just what IB metal serves which cities.

American Airlines Hub Maps, 2002: Miami

If there is one region where American Airlines unquestionably dominates, it is Latin America. This bland 2002 map of American's Miami Complex shows a showering spray of routes, at lower left touching each vertebrae in the Andean spine, from the Yucatan to Tierra del Fuego, with neat vertical rows of Leeward and Windward destinations at right and lower center, with the remainder of South American supercities at bottom. A dotted line shows the codeshare with South African Airways from Miami to Cape Town and Jo'berg. London, Paris and Madrid are also served non-stop.

American Airlines Hub Maps, 2002: Dallas/Fort Worth

DFW: American's headquarters hub and its southern transcontinental supercomplex. An astounding number of domestic non-stops, from a long vertical row down the California coast to a matching column on the eastern seaboard, and an arch spanning the Pacific Northwest, Midwest and Canada. At bottom, a diagonal curve of Mexican cities is shown, with a more random array of subtropical cities below this, including Belize, Panama, Lima, Santiago, Caracas, and Sao Paulo. Both Osaka and Tokyo are connected directly at far left, with four European cities: London, Paris, Frankfurt, and Manchester served non-stop at upper right.