Czechoslovak State Airline Network, 1932

Recent posts from the Eastern Bloc and the Elbe Valley remind us for this ancient item. From our records, this may be the oldest article ever featured on the Timetablist. A 1932 flight plan for the Czechoslovak State Airline, the earliest ancestor of CSA, in one of its first years of operation.

Several spider webs of spindly routes spread outward over the toast-brown landscape, from the main base at Prague, but also Vienna, Munich, Berlin, Warsaw and Venice. It's possible that the airline's own operations were merely those marked by the thicker line: Karlovy Vary—Prague—Brno—Bratislava—Zagreb and Bratislava—Košice—Cluj—Bucharest. A dozen other secondary cities are shown, it's unclear who, in these early days of aviation, was operating these routes. 

What looks to almost certainly be a Ford Tri-Motor tilts its way over Trieste in a tangerine dawn. Czechoslovak Air is listed as an operator on the craft's Wikipedia page. 

Sadly, this aviation pioneer was short-lived, as the Sudetenland annexation was barely eight years away from the publication of this literature. CSA would be resurrected in the post-war era, as we shall see in the following posts. 

Belleair Network, January 2011

A two-page spread from Belleair's in-flight magazine features the Albanian airlines's somewhat aspirational route map of Europe. Existing destinations--presumably all from Tirana--are some twenty Italian airports plus Stuttgart, Zurich, Liege in Belgium, and Pristina, in Kosovo. These are surrounded by a number of other capitals, which are given equal billing but designated with yellow and blue points. These are charter destinations (in blue) and "future destinations" (in yellow)-- what plans are in the works to reach Dortmund or Dresden, Maastricht or Malmö is not made clear, but the lovely cursive script at upper left declares that Belleair is "growing together."

Alitalia: Domestic Routes, c.1969

The national network of Alitalia around 1969, sporting the "ATI" (Aero Transporti Italia) emblem at top. With its "barbell" pattern of centers at Rome and Milan, and a large number of routes out of Naples, Turin, and Venice, the system connected more than a dozen airports on the mainland boot and multiple cities on the large islands of Sicily and Sardinia, as well as the smaller and more distant Pantelleria and Lampedusa.

A box at lower-right shows a zoomed-in route map for Elivie, the helicopter-line subsidiary of Alitalia, which ran passenger operations out of Naples to Capri and Ischia. If this item is correctly dated to 1969, it would be the last year of Elivie's operations, which was closed in 1970.