RAK Airways: Closer connections from Pakistan to the Middle East, c.2011

In what is becoming something of a RAK Airways week, Timetablist follows on fro yesterday's post, mining the online archives of the defunct air carrier's Facebook page. Here is a nice advert boasting of Ras Al-Khaimah's "national airline" convenient connections between Lahore and Peshawar to the UAE, Doha, Jeddah and Kuwait, as seen through the airplane windows in the middle of the page. Prices quoted in Pakistani rupees. Cheap and cheerful for the many employment migrants from the subcontinent to the Gulf. 

RAK Airways to Bangkok, June 2012

Continuing from yesterday's post, the cheery but moribund Facebook page of RAK Airways is a vault of azure-blue online advertisements, although the posting ceased with the demise of the airline in 2013. This 518-image strong archive would provide the Timetablist with dozens of potential post topics, but one that is especially worth contemplating is this item, from mid-2012, when the flag carrier of the emirate of Ras Al-Khaimah reached to its farthest extent, with a 4x weekly service to Bangkok, a flight not included on yesterday's route map. 

RAK Airways Destinations, c.2009

The a web graphic from the erstwhile RAK Airways, showing what was probably the maximum extent of that airline's reach: a 7,000-km span across the Arab world to southern Asia, from Cairo to Calicut to Chittagong. The national airline of the emirate of Ras Al-Khaimah seemed to be marketing feeder traffic for guest workers throughout the region, sourced mainly from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Egypt. The airline's short Wikipedia page recounts the interesting saga of its launch, suspension, rebirth and second death, while the airline's Facebook page, last updated in December 2013 (shortly before the airline's final demise), has some nice photos of its pair of A320s during its 2.0 iteration. Scrolling back through the social media posts reveals that Amman and Kozhikode, not shown above, were part of the second generation. The airline's original website, meanwhile, now hosts a curious flow of long-form, contemplative text on contemporary travel. 

The airline's home base, Ras Al-Khaimah International Airport, has partially recovered from the collapse; it now hosts operations by low-cost Air Arabia and Air India Express to many of the same destinations as RAK Airways, as well as charter flights from Germany, Latvia, Poland and Russia to the hot-sand beach resorts of the northeastern United Arab Emirates.