International Departures from O.R. Tambo Airport, July 2017 (2)

An update of half an hour from the last post: the Asian long-hauls of Emirates and Singapore are delayed, while Qatar Airways is leaving on time for Doha. Ethiopian seems like it may not make it out on schedule, as the gates still open 25 minutes prior to pushback.

Another block of near and far intra-African flights on South African Airways has filled up the 3-4PM block: Maseru, Lesotho; Lagos, Nigeria, Douala, Cameroon, Maputo, Mozambique, Nairobi, Kenya, and Manzini, in Swaziland. After that, an Air Botswana short-hop to Gaborone (see also this post from the previous week). 

Qatar Airways Route Network, November 2016: Australasia

We end our examination of the global network of Qatar Airways back where we started: its Australian services, with non-stop flights to four Aussie cities. Perhaps more worthy of note is the recent development of the incredible, 18-hour Doha—Auckland non-stop, which, however briefly, would be the world's longest non-stop flight, if and when its launch is no longer under delay. Currently, Emirates Dubai—Auckland holds the title. 

Qatar Airways Route Network, November 2016: East Asia

While Qatar Airways's global coverage thins out as it reaches the Pacific, the airline offers a respectable seven gateways into China, including Hangzhou, Chengdu, and Chongqing—one of the few external airlines to serve these secondary Chinese cities. Qatar Airways is also one of only a handful of airlines to serve Clark Airport in Subic Bay, in the Philippines—although Emirates also flies non-stop from Dubai, presumably as a conduit for labor migrants to the Gulf region. 

Qatar Airways Route Network, November 2016: South Asia

Like its Gulf rivals, Qatar Airways has blanketed South Asia with direct service to more than two-dozen cities: seven in Pakistan and thirteen in India. Too many to label here, but like Emirates and Etihad, Qatar acts as a de-facto state carrier not for the Gulf region but for the Indian subcontinent. 

Qatar Airways Route Network, November 2016: The GCC and South America

Like Etihad and Emirates, the ultra-long haul routes to South America are Qatar Airways rarest expeditions. A single Doha—São Paulo—Buenos Aires route makes Hamad International Airport a six-continent hub. 

Given the dearth of Latin American routes, this corner of the route map features an eye-glass inset of the GCC, showing Qatar's numerous routes to the UAE, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, which connect on Qatar to an impressive eight destinations, including Hofuf, which premieres on the Timetablist here for the first time. 

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. 

Qatar Airways Route Network, November 2016: The African Routes

Qatar Airways has not merely mimicked its rival Emirates in expanding across Africa, but has in several cases gone beyond the Dubai-based carrier to destinations which it now serves alone. These include more recent additions to the Qatar network, such as Kigali, Maputo (which has had a short and somewhat rocky history as a destination, served thrice-weekly with a Dreamliner), Marrakesh and Windhoek (added only back in October), but also more proximate East African destinations such as Kilimanjaro and Zanzibar (the latter served by flyDubai). The airline competes with Emirates on the major routes from Cape Town to Casablanca, but is not anywhere near as strong in West Africa, flying only to Lagos. 

Qatar Airways Route Network, November 2016: Europe (2)

A second post on the same section of Qatar Airway's route map, showing its nearly 40 non-stops to Europe, including four cities in the UK, and three in Italy, including Pisa. 

Qatar Airways Route Network, November 2016: Europe

Like it's arch-rival Emirates, Qatar Airways blankets Europe with over two-dozen non-stops from Doha, although many of these are with its narrow-body A320 aircraft, the airline also intersperses its A330, B777, and B787 widebodies into these operations. Paris and London also see Qatar's double-decker A380 superjumbos. Qatar serves a number of cities which seldom see intercontinental flights, especially in southeastern Europe and the Balkans: Sarajevo and Skopje in particular. 

Qatar Airways Route Network, November 2016: the Near East

The route map from a recent copy of Qatar Airways's Oryx in-flight magazine is rendered in a delightful mosaic style which disregards national borders or indeed physical topography. While the coastlines of continents are faithfully represented in detail, the landmasses almost look to be assembled in stained glass. 

Overlaid on these overlapping watercolors are the close-laid threads of Qatar Airways vast, six-continent network, today one the very largest of any of the world's airlines. The grey strokes flow outward from Doha in graceful parallels, almost like strands of baleen. 

Over the next week, we will examine this vast route map in detail, but begin here at the center of the map, which shows destinations of the greater Near East, such as the dense service to Mesopotamia and the Caucus. We will look at the huge number of European routes in the following post.  

Qatar Airways: Daily to Adelaide, May 2016

In continuing to look at the airlines of the Gulf, we necessarily turn to Qatar Airways, which is today almost as much a global benemoth as its archrival, Emirates, based just 278km due east of Doha. 

Qatar has capitalized on its geolocation in the same manner as Emirates, and this includes competing on the Kangaroo routes from Europe to Australia, although its challenging to match the partnership of between Emirates and Qantas. 

Of Qatar Airways's relentless expansion which continued in 2016, daily service to Adelaide began in May with a brand-new A350. The surfboard motif is here used to show the map of the continental nation, each board with one of Qatar's four Australian destinations. 

Long-Haul Destinations from Berlin, Summer 2015

Like many a good German airport company, the management of Berlin Tegel issues a printed timetable for traveler's reference. As we conclude the present series of posts on operations at Tegel in the Summer of 2015, this map offers an appropriate conclusion. 

There are two many cities here to feature in one or even two posts, and it is not particularly noteworthy that the German capital is connected to some three dozen other cities across Europe. This week we have, however, discussed a bit about the somewhat peculiar circumstances of Berlin's commercial air transportation, still divided between multiple airports, awaiting the long-delayed opening of its 21st century hub.

In the meantime, tiny Tegel, something of the LaGuardia of central Europe, squeezes in only a handful of long-hual flights, in part due to the city's dispersion of air traffic and in part due to the 

centralization of airline operations around Lufthansa's Frankfurt megahub and Munich base. 

Hometown carrier Air Berlin does the city some good turns, particularly the high-prestige widebody services to New York JFK and Chicago O'Hare. United offers the only US Flag appearance, with its 767 flights to Newark (although these are sometimes ignominiously downgraded to narrow body 757s in the winter). Delta Air Lines just announced this month that it will soon return to Tegel, which is symbolically important as Tegel was such an important base for Pan-Am's intra-Europe operations that Delta inherited. Air Berlin also flies to Reykjavík-Keflavík and a number of warm-weather leisure destinations. 

Perhaps more interesting are the handful of airlines connecting eastward to Asia. Azerbaijan Airlines was just recently featured here, and Qatar Airways scored a coup when it beat out Emirates for service to the Gulf—although Etihad snuck in through its ownership stake in Air Berlin, which flies non-stop to Abu Dhabi. Iraqi Airways makes for more fun planespotting, flying to both Erbil and Baghdad. This post is the first time we've featured the Iraqi flag carrier. 

Hainan Airlines added Berlin to its European system in 2012 along with Brussels and Budapest, and connects to Beijing with a A330-200 (rather than one of its Dreamliners). But what is surely the most unusual airline landing in Reinickendorf is MIAT Mongolian Airlines, which has actually long-served Berlin, landing its A310s at Schönefeld since at least the late 1990s. The Mongolian flag carrier currently operates one its gorgeously painted B767-300s via Moscow Sheremetyevo airport, and this post marks its premier on the Timetablist.  Although the airline also flies twice-weekly non-stop to Frankfurt, and once served Prague, Berlin is one its only European gateways. 

Atlas Global: Sharjah to Istanbul and Beyond, June 2016

Having repeatedly featured RAK Airways recently, the Timetablist stays with our theme of the less well-known of the United Arab Emirates' airports with Ras Al-Khaimah's neighboring emirate, Sharjah. Once a larger and more prominent waystation than Dubai, Sharjah today acts as a suburban bedroom community for its now-world-famous hub next door. With over a million and a half people, it is a significant urban center in its own right, and its airport, barely 20 kilometers from DXB, is served by about 20 airlines, regional flag carriers like Air India, Egyptair, Qatar Airways, Saudia and Pakistan International, to more distant and exotic carriers like Uzbekistan Airways and  SCAT of Kazakhstan.

Sharjah International may be most prominent due to its role as the home base of Air Arabia, the Easyjet of the Middle East, which dominates with flights to three score of destinations blanketing the UAE's near-catchment, from Sarajevo to Nairobi to Chittagong.

Also among the more low-cost carriers hanging at Sharjah is AtlasGlobal, a young Turkish airline whose new name (from the previous AtlasJet) makes it sound more like a cargo carrier than a passenger airline. With hubs at both of Istanbul's two airports and a fleet of red-striped A320s, AtlasGlobal seems to be following Air Arabia's model of generic no-frills regional connector. It will, it seems, splash out on advertising: here, along the humid corniche of Ras Al-Khaimah, these lightbox advertisements boast of AtlasGlobal's ultracheap roundtrips to Istanbul from Sharjah: at just AED892 (less than $250). Whether Atatürk or Sabiha Gokcen is not specified: AtlasGlobal services both from Sharjah, although it appears the Turkish dotted capital "I" was observed. Shame it couldn't get a better URL for its web address. 

Gulf Air: Four Times Weekly to Athens, Relaunched June 2014

Quite unlike the contemporary six-continent dominance of its progeny, Bahrain-based Gulf Air's fortunes have long been on a slow but steady decline. Operations as far-flung as Houston and Hong Kong, Johannesburg and Jakarta, Manchester and Melbourne are all long gone, as the multi-state alliance was pulled apart. 

Today, there are no flights to North America, East Asia or Australia, and its once-comprehensive spread across Europe has been reduced to only London, Paris, Frankfurt, Istanbul and Moscow.

It was somewhat of a victorious move, therefore, to relaunch flights to a new Euro gateway, in this case, the somewhat-unlikely choice of Athens, which, despite the economic contraction that if anything exceeds in magnitude the retreat of Gulf Air itself, at least has the advantage of being within range of Gulf Air's narrow body fleet. 

Late Evening Departures from Doha Hamad International Airport, January 2015

Staying with Qatar Airways and Doha, from yesterday's post, here is a screenshot of the departures board at Hamad International Airport from January 2015, showing the remarkable reach of the number 2 of the "Gulf 3" as part of the State of Qatar's wide-ranging campaign to raise the global profile and relevance of the tiny, wealthy emirate.

But it also demonstrates the degree to which that profile is still limited to its own initiatives: while Qatar Airway's worldwide network makes Hamad International one of the few airports in the world to link to all six inhabited continents nonstop, this is largely limited to the state carrier's operations itself—few other airlines serve Doha. 

While DOH's flight boards normally subsist of a predominance of QR flights, here the flag carrier only connects merely to Dubai, Kuwait, and Bahrain—much less grand than the ultra-long haul, hexacontinental operations such as those noted earlier this week. 

In this particular time block there are two European long-haul operations: Lufthansa connecting at Bahrain to Frankfurt, and British Airways to London, while Gulf Air also connects to Bahrain, its base. Elsewhere in the Gulf, Emirates, and flydubai do their bit as part of the "Doha-Dubai shuttle," nowadays the busiest intra-Gulf route. Looking further east, there are several Jet Airways flights to Cochin, Delhi and Mumbai, whereas SriLankan connects to Colombo at 10:40pm.

Qatar Airways: Non-stop to the United States, January 2015

A window screen advert, shields the Qatar Airways ticket office in the Seef quarter of Manama, Bahrain from the blazing sun. A glossy, angled photo of "The Bean," Anish Kapoor's cloudgate sculpture in Millennium Park, Chicago, advertises Qatar's "5-star journeys to the USA" from Doha to Chicago, Houston, New York, and Washington. Philadelphia, Miami and Dallas announced in non-alphabetical order (but perhaps order of inaugural route?) in the second row— "launching soon" the asterisk denotes the still-large fine print. The latter three came on in the succeeding months; Los Angeles, Boston and Atlanta were later added in 2016. 

Muscat: Flight Departures, 4 December 2015

Relating to today's previous post, here is a two-hour window stretching from late afternoon into early evening at Muscat International Airport last December. While Oman Air has the majority of operations, Qatar Airways, Etihad, Kuwait Airways and Air Arabia are also on the board. Destinations are limited to the immediate Gulf states, with the exception of Islamabad, Pakistan. 

Delta Air Lines: Dubai to Atlanta, January 2016

A poster-stand placed outside an upscale travel agency in Dubai, advertising Delta's non-stop service to Atlanta, promising connections across the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and beyond. At the time of the photo had barely a month to go. The flight was scrapped in a high-profile complaint by Delta that Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways have unfair advantage in the market. Although hardly the only market that Delta has retreated from (see Abuja, Monrovia, Cairo, Kiev, Amman, Bucharest, Budapest, Helsinki, Warsaw, Vienna, Cape Town, Delhi, Chennai, Istanbul, among others), Delta also stated in its press release announcing its withdrawal from Mumbai that the failure of the route was also due to the massive capacity that the Gulf 3 have added. It surely stung that Qatar launched a new service from Doha to Atlanta just months later—starting the service with an A380.

United Air Lines also pulled out of Dubai in January, and has also withdrawn the remainder of its Gulf operations, citing the same uncompetitive conditions, although here is an interesting blogpost regarding United's withdrawal from Kuwait, suggesting a different sort of government involvement.

Kuwait International Airport: Arrivals Board, 14 August 2015 (cont).

Continuing from the previous post, the arrivals board at Kuwait Airport, showing the finally-arrived British Airways flight, shown at the moment as an Iberia codeshare. Hometown Kuwait Airways has more flights in than out, with arrivals from Islamabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Cochin, Colombo, Dhaka, and Istanbul. Rival Jazeera Airways arrives from two central Egyptian cities: Sohag and Luxor. Emirates shows up again, as it always does. Oman Air comes in from Muscat; Qatar Airways from Doha.

Just as with the Departures screen, an obscure Iranian air carrier makes for fun planespotting at KIA: The blue swanned-tail of Iran Aseman Airlines arrives from tiny Lamerd in coastal Fars Province at 7:40. A status is not given. 

El Al: Boston to Tel Aviv Non-stop, June 2015

In just the last four years, starting in about 2012, Boston's Logan International Airport has seen one of the most astonishing periods of international traffic growth in the history of American aviation. In a startlingly compacts period of time, beginning with JAL's dreamliner service to Narita in April 2012, Logan's somewhat pedestrian terminal E has seen an astonishing addition of new tail fins—especially those running long- and ultra-long haul intercontinental flights from New England: Hainan, Emirates, Cathay Pacific, COPA, Aeromexico, Turkish, and WOW Air. These are now being joined by Norwegian, Qatar Airways, Eurowings, Air Berlin, SAS, Thomson Airways and TAP Air Portugal, in addition to new services by Jetblue, Logan's de facto hub airline. 

Last year, in mid-2015, El Al was a somewhat unlikely participant in this onrush. The Israeli flag carrier launched a thrice-weekly B767-300 non-stop to the Holy Land gateway, Ben Gurion International Airport. This print ad, boasting a beachy scene of Tel Aviv's skyscraper-studded riviera, featured in Boston magazine ahead of the first flight. Likely paid for by Massport as part of the incitement package offered to El Al to secure and support the service. Whatever the state agency has been doing, it's been doing it right.