Imperial Airways, 1937: The African Routes

As with its trans-Asian operations shown yesterday, the technology available to Imperial Airways in the early age of aviation necessitated a series of regular way stations for the royal charter's southerly system spanning Africa.

After the upper Nile, the line made its way to Khartoum, whence it splits, with one line turning to the west: Kano—Lagos—Accra and finally Takoradi, which only has domestic links today. There must have been pitstops in the drylands of French Central Africa but these are unnamed here; the paths of the green routes, connecting Algeria and Morocco to Niger and then the Congo, and reaching across to Madagascar, suggest French operations.

Continuing to follow the Nile south, the Cairo-to-Cape line stopped at Malakal, toady in South Sudan, then fanned across British East Africa in a complex web which appears to shown that one set of services remained inland along the Great Rift, passing through Nairobi on the way to Lusaka, Salisbury (today Harare) and Bulawayo in Rhodesia, and  then finally ending at Johannesburg. 

Another schedule reached the Swahili coast at Mombasa—Dar Es Salaam—(Ma)lindi and coastal Mozambique, with a bridge connection through Nyasaland at Blantyre, passing through Lourenço Marques (today Maputo) to terminate at Durban. The unlabeled green lines with the Union clearly suggest an early-stage South African Airways, reaching both Cape Town and Windhoek. 

BOAC: The Speedbird Routes Across the World 1950: #2

Continuign from the previous post, the Speedbird Routes of BOAC touched a surprising number of non-Anglophone cities as they extended south from London to Casablanca, Port Etienne, then Bathurst, Freetown, Takoradi, Accra, and Lagos. A planned route would continue to Kano and cross the center of Africa to Khartoum, where the eastern line extends south to Nairobi and Johannesburg.

Less impressive than its African network are its trans-Atlantic routes, as just two left the home countries from Glasgow and Shannon, met again at Gander, and extended into North America to New York and Montreal. A single route from Baltimore linked Bermuda offshore.

Antrak Air: No One Flies Ghana Like We Do, 2012

The optimism emanating from this A4 advertisement posted to the door of Antrak Air's ticket office in the domestic wing of Kotoka International Airport is somewhat dented by the sarcastic "R.I.P." scribbled in blue Bic at the bottom.

Thankfully for the aviation company, the fleet's grounding in the wake of an onboard fire in the spring of 2012 was temporary, and the airline is offering domestic flights between Accra and Kumasi, Sunyani, and Takoradi multiple times daily, although now it faces stiff competition from the grandiloquently named African World Airlines, and in the last week a second aircraft fire renewed calls in the Ghanaian press for the airline's immediate grounding.

Antrak Air Route Map, 2011

A rather less hi-tech graphic design than the previous posts' late-model, video-game grade inflight map from Kenya Airways is this amateurish route map from Antrak Air, showing its domestic routes from Accra. The flight to Sunyani takes a particularly hard right turn, which could possibly be navigational reality but more likely is dictated by an unfamiliarity with a basic PC Paint program. Antrak's services to Ougadougou did not last, and with the arrival of Starbow and Fly540, Antrak is no longer the chief of Ghanaian skies. But its affordable, scheduled runs to interior cities, especially its more recent links to Sunyani and Wa, serve as a vital link to the boom-town capital, and the carrier can be forgiven a lack of computer drawing skills.