Aeromexico: The Monterrey Hub, December 2015

A third map from Aeromexico's inflight magazine, focusing on the airline's secondary hub at the northern economic powerhouse of Monterrey, just south of the Texas border. Long a manufacturing hub, Monterrey has boomed in the NAFTA era with its convenient position to the United States. Aeromexico's operations reflect that, with two routes over the Rio Grande to San Antonio and Houston, and longer connections to Atlanta, Miami, and New York, as well as Detroit—an automaker's route. Las Vegas and Los Angeles are the only other transborder flights, other than the long route to Tokyo, which as discussed in the previous post was discontinued. 

The internal flights are clustered together on this cartographic projection, with Chihuahua almost as far away as Atlanta and Tijuana just in front of "Tokio." A number of other Mexican cities make their Timetablist debut with this post, including Tampico, Culiac, Puerto Vallarta, and Aguascalientes. Many of these services have been cut back as Mexico's many low-cost carriers, particularly Ryanair's Mexican venture VivaAerobus and Volaris have come to dominate the domestic airspace. Volaris now carries the largest share of domestic passengers in the country. 

Aeromexico: The Intercontinental Routes, December 2015

 Somehow in the storied history of The Timetableist, now approaching its 11th anniversary, the great air carrier of the Federal Republic of Mexico has never been previously featured. Continuing from the previous post, it's opportune to take the fiesta stop-over in México D.F. and look at the country's remaining flag carrier as it looked in its expansionist phase of half a decade ago.

Aeromexico runs a three-continent strategy, covering the main gateways of the Americas, switching through its central Benito Juarez hub, while stretching its reach across the oceans with what is now an all-Dreamliner fleet. Of particular interest is the triplet of Trans-Pacific efforts: Mexico City—Tokyo (Narita), Monterrey—Narita, and Mexico City—Tijuana—Shanghai—Mexico City, which neatly landed Benito Juarez at exactly the same time as it took off from Pudong International. 

According to the always reliable Wikipedia, the Monterrey—Japan service was a temporary technical stop on the way from Mexico City in lieu of Tijuana. Service today is non-stop from Mexico City only. 

In early 2017, the carrier announced a second attempt to link the northern economic powerhouse of Nuevo León with Asia: a four times weekly Mexico City—Monterrey—Incheon schedule which, like the Tokyo service, would return eastbound non-stop. Apparently this proved unnecessary, as Aeromexico still served ICN as of early 2020 but only non-stop from Mexico City. 

While this peninsular service seems to have met with success—presumably due to links with SkyTeam megacarrier Korean Air—the non-stop to Shanghai and SkyTeam partner China Eastern proved less durable, as the thrice-weekly long haul was cut in mid-2019.

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. 

Etihad Route Map, September 2016: East Asia & Australia

Continuing on from the previous post, the right-hand side of Etihad's route map shows its presence in East Asia and the key Australian routes, including Melbourne and Sydney, two of the airline's five A380 destinations. Beijing—Nagoya is a rare non-direct-to-Abu Dhabi connection for Etihad, which even has fifth-freedom rights within the route. Likewise, Chengdu is a rather daring entry into central China in what is otherwise a strategy strictly limited to primary cities—perhaps the airline was stung by the failure of its Chonqing service—one of only a handful cities that Etihad has retreated from. Qatar Airways has followed Etihad, launching flights to Chengdu in 2013. 

SAS: Intercontinental routes, 2003

Yesterday's post, with its many routes between Scandinavia at Thailand, relate to this polar-projection route map, showing the intercontinental routes of Scandinavian Airlines in 2003. A decade ago, those consisted of flights to the United States and East Asia, mostly from Copenhagen, although there were also Stockholm—Chicago,  Stockholm—Newark, and Oslo—Newark flights.

Since the publication of this timetable, there have been a number of changes: Seattle was dropped in 2009 after 42 years of non-stop service, Bangkok followed in 2013, ending 60 years of service, and flights from Singapore are now operated only by Singapore Airlines. In their place, Shanghai was added to the network in 2012,  San Francisco flights started in 2013, and Stockholm—Hong Kong began in 2015. 

The expansion has continued rapidly in the past year: Stockholm—Los Angeles was relaunched in March 2016, a return to Southern California after three decades of absence, and two routes to Miami began in September 2016.

Thai Airways Route Table: Routes from Bangkok, P-Z, November 2016

Continuing on from the previous series of posts, here is the second page of Thai Airways's Route Table in the back of its in-flight magazine. This post finishes tagging all the destinations from Bangkok, as nearby as Siem Reap (this post marking the premier of this destination on The Timetablist) and Vientiane, to as distant as Zürich, Rome and Stockholm. Note that both Haneda and Narita are present for Tokyo, and Xiamen is one of the mainland Chinese cities which have joined the network. 

Although Thai Airways is diminished from its previous glory days, because of the strength of Thailand as a leisure destination, it remains present in a number of secondary European gateways, as this route table shows. 

Thai Airways: The eastward route network, 2013

The right-hand side of the route network of Thai Airways International, another page from a 2013 edition of the flag carrier's Sawasdee inflight magazine, continuing from the previous post. Most connections from Bangkok, are unsurprising, with a number of cross-connections at Hong Kong and Seoul, although perhaps more interesting are the routes to Kunming and Chengdu in interior China. The inset shows domestic routes and the now-scrapped service to Los Angeles.

Thai Airways: The International Routes, 2013

Like Garuda (not to mention Malaysia Airlines), Thai Airways International is still a going concern but is significantly smaller than it has been in the past. This table, from the back of Thai Airway's inflight magazine from 2013, illustrates the point. Information listing the airline's international services from Bangkok from R—Z, with Rome no longer a destination. A handful of secondary leisure routes are shown thereafter, such as Copenhagen—Phuket and Stockholm—Phuket, and intra-Asian flights such as Hong Kong—Seoul and Hong Kong—Taipei, as well as the old Seoul—Los Angeles route which was removed from the schedule in 2015 after 35 years of service.

Also interesting here are the number of routes to tertiary Indian cities, specifically Varanasi and Gaya, presumably as pilgrimage sites. 

Garuda Indonesia: The International Routes, 2016

Staying in Southeast Asia as we finish up the month, it recently came to the attention of the Timetablist editorial committee that Garuda Indonesia has never been featured here before. A remarkable oversight which is today corrected with the airline's present route map.

Although the Timetablist strives to exhibit only the finest and more informative examples of airline cartography from the present and the past, all that we have available today is this extraordinarily complicated route map  from the airline's website.

While we applaud an airline which still undertakes to provide an old-fashioned route map on a website in this day and age, and we note that the batik-print of the continental landmasses here is a nice touch, the over-representation of codeshare routes muddles the instructional value of this map.

Perhaps the excess is an attempt to match the flag carrier's former glory. Having once had a wider reach and grander ambitions, Garuda endured an ignominious period as an international aviation pariah, black-listed from European Union airports from 2007 until 2009, and forced to retreat from some of its flagship routes, particularly the prestigious Los Angeles service and the Jakarta—Amsterdam trunk route to its colonial metropole along with every other inch of European airspace.

As with so many flag carriers, the contemporary iteration of Garuda is a simpler, more streamlined version, serving far fewer cities, both it is immediate region and farther afield. The triumph of the airline's renaissance has been its return to Amsterdam Schiphol, and, more recently, the reintroduction of service to London Heathrow in March of this year. Of late, management has publicly affirmed its commitment to reconnect to LAX by next year.  

That the Garuda of today only serves two European cities is nearly impossible to decipher from this route map, which shows more cities in Europe, 21, than foreign destinations that Garuda actually operates anywhere.

In truth, Garuda flies to Jeddah and Medina, (as much for the labor migration of its citizens as for holy pilgramages) and otherwise just a bare handful of east Asian megacities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Hong Kong. Flights out of both Jakarta and Denpasar airport on Bali to the major Australian cities of Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney cater to both tourism and business.

That's it. That is the extent of Garuda Indonesia at present. The dozens of other cities on this map are superfluous, showing codeshares and even freighter routes. In this day and age, most travelers are at least vaguely aware that an international airline cooperates with other carriers to ferry passengers beyond it own network; it is therefore completely unhelpful to show Cairo, Nairobi, Barcelona and Bahrain here. An airline's route map would best be limited to the airline's own routes, to demonstrate the actual extent of an airline's operation.

As it is, strangely random information, such as showing both “Moscow” as well as “Sheremetyevo” obscure more interesting operations such as Garuda's Jakarta—Singapore—Amsterdam—Jakarta routing and its non-stop from Medan to Jeddah. As it is, the map gives a sense that Garuda is attempting to display the wide breadth of its former glory of decades past, to the detriment of a more informative graphic.

China Airlines: Direct Flight Non-Stop from Rome to Taipei, November 2016

                                      

A back-lit billboard currently gracing the departures halls of Rome Fiumicino Airport, promoting China Airlines's hub at Taipei as a gateway to the "Extreme Orient" and Oceania. Although the dotted lines land on countries, not specific cities, there are a lot of options of the Italian traveler headed east, as CAL links to three cities in Australia, two in New Zealand, two in Malaysia, and a dozen in Japan. Indonesia and the Philippines are also served but are not shown on this advertisement's map. 

Finnair: The Shortcut to 11 Cities in Asia, 2012

As our first post of the month featured an unusual route between easternmost Europe and China, this item which has been in our filebox for a few years seems most relevant. Finnair has over the last decade remade itself as a premier airline between Europe and Asia, especially China, avoiding competing on the trans-Atlantic competition, where its northeasternmost position was a disadvantage, and playing up the strength of Helsinki's near-polar location the long-haul routes follow flow across the continent efficiently. 

Finnair has had a lot of success with this strategy, even profiting from some of the world's more random long-haul routings from what is essentially a very small airport at Vantaa to cities such as Nagoya and Chongqing, which was the newest destination on this map. Since this magazine advert, Finnair has expanded into China further, reintroducing Guangzhou and adding Xi'an, as well as serve to Ho Chi Minh City, although Hanoi was less successful. Much of this service is also apparently seasonal. 

This advert's smooth whites and greys almost feel polar, positioning the globe in such a way that the 11 trans-Asian routes flow over its curvature. Its unclear exactly what the European routes are, as they are not labeled, but the concept of Helsinki as a transit hub is made quite clear. A single line tucks behind the planet, indicate Finnair's few North American routes, which currently consist of New York and Miami and seasonal service to Chicago, but will soon include San Francisco. Boston, Ft. Lauderdale, Seattle, Toronto and Montreal are among those cities that didn't work out. 

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. 

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. 

Kuwait Airways: Three New Destinations, Summer 2013

Kuwait Airways is a bit of a dinosaur in the ecosystem of the Middle East's fast-moving air space, having long-since been eclipsed by the megacarrier trio of Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways, and having receded from its previous extents, which once reached as far as Chicago, Tokyo, and Singapore. In the present era, the slow-moving state carrier boasts when it returns to such nearby nations as Turkey. Here, an advert from mid-2013, showing a rather cautious re-entry into southeastern Europe, with two weekly flights to Vienna and Sarajevo, and a mere 3-weekly flights to Istanbul, now the sixth-busiest airport in Europe.

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.

JAL: San Francisco-Tokyo Haneda on the Dreamliner: The quickest way to Metropolitan Tokyo, 2014

JAL may have the fastest service on board brand-new planes, opening up frontiers in intercontinental flights from the here-to-fore mostly domestic airport at Haneda to California aboard a brand-new B787 Dreamliner, but it certainly has chosen a World Wide Web 1.0 fashion to publicize its pioneering: this banner advert looks like it was made in about 1998.

United: One-Airline Service from the Pacific Northwest to Tokyo and Hong Kong, c.1985

Back in the mid-1980s, when East Asia was still referred to as "the Orient" and frequent flier programs were still new, it was apparently quite remarkable to be able to fly from a "top 100 U.S. business center" to the exotic Far East—not non-stop or one-stop, but one-airline. Nowadays, of course, airline alliances mean that what color the plane is painted in hardly matters any more, but in those days, printing boarding passes and baggage handling still were worth bragging about it print. Not entirely clear whether Portland, Oregon had trans-Pacific service as well, but clearly Seattle was acting as a gateway. United flew SeaTac-Tokyo until only last year; but today Delta is the main U.S. carrier with intercontinental services.

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. 

South African Airways: the Australasian routes, 2013

The East Asian and Australian section of South African Airways' route map, from its inflight magazine in mid-2013, shows as many services of other carriers in the Star Alliance as it does of its own operations, which consist only of flights from Johannesburg to Beijing, Hong Kong, and Perth. Flights to Singapore on Singapore Airlines and Bangkok on Thai Airways from Joberg are shown. A fan of flights from Hong Kong to Seoul on Asiana and several Japanese cities on All Nippon fill up northeastern Asia. The Qantas flight to Sydney is shown, which weaves into a network of Air New Zealand flights to Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch.

Cathay Pacific: System Timetable, Winter 1989-90

It's hard to make out all the various cities in Cathay Pacific's network in the immediate years following the return of Hong Kong to China, but it is interesting to note that a non-stop to Manchester was added to the network for this 1989-90 winter, a route which does not exist today. Port Moresby was added to the route to Auckland, and network stretched into the Indian Ocean with a flight to Mauritius.  A single trans-Pacific service links San Francisco, via Vancouver.