Malev: Budapest-Wien-München, Budapest-Zürich, c.1964

 

Starting off the Timetablist's twelfth year where we left off in December: in Europe of the mid-20th century, here moving a bit further east at one of a series gorgeous illustrated postcards from Malév Hungarian Airlines, which recall similar articles that have been posted here in the past. 

Like several eastern-European airlines, Malév flew over the iron curtain to link to its regional neighbors; here shown are two routes which run to nearby Vienna; one which continues on to Munich. The other alternatively turns around in a triangle formation at Zürich, which appears to rotate via Konstanz or possibly Friedrichshafen. Only the main airports: Ferihegy (Budapest), Schwechat (Vienna), the old Riem (of Munich, closed in 1992), and Kloten (Zürich) are demarcated by yellow airfield logographs. 

Despite the other delightful pictograms of the image, showing the cathedrals, castles and other landmarks of several of the cities, as a cartographic conveyance of information, the postcard fails to make clear just which cities are served on each route and which are passed over. It appears that between Budapest and Vienna there is a turn at Győr; after Vienna, the Munich route seems to stopover in Linz. Intriguingly, it seems as though the Zürich route, although avoiding Vienna, still lands in Österreich, as it splits westward at the small city of Brück an der Leitha across the Austrian border (of course making its Timetablist debut here). The flight path then makes a gentle turn at Salzburg, which is denoted by a coin-like cartouche of Mozart himself. 

ALIA: The Royal Jordanian Airline Network, 1984-85

A loose cartography to show the route system of Alia: The Royal Jordanian Airline in the mid-1980s, when the carrier had ambitiously reached four continents, but had not yet been rebranded as simply "Royal Jordanian' —the Alia was the name of the King Hussein's daughter, the Princess, a very curious nomenclature for a commercial carrier. 

The map spreads out the many European destinations served from Amman, as many as 15 apparently, including the somewhat unusual cities such as Belgrade and Bucharest; although these lesser cities likely saw the B707 and B727, at the time, the L-1011 was becoming the workhorse of the fleet. 

Most notably, Alia carried the crown of Hashemite throne to distant Chicago and distant Los Angeles, via Vienna, as well as New York via Amsterdam, possibly utilizing the airline's B747-200s, of which there were as many as three during the 1980s. Today the successor carrier still serves O'Hare, non-stop with debasing graphite-grey B787 Dreamliners.

Alia offered a comprehensive schedule across its immediate region, from Tripoli and Tunis in North Africa to Beirut and Damascus in the Levant to the many capitals of the Gulf—note that the map once again takes its liberties, showing the Doha-Muscat link leaping to the left, making room for the Dubai-Karachi connection below. The two east Asian services, nonstops to Bangkok and Singapore, are set apart. Looking closely, the airline's sole domestic destination, Aqaba, is shown directly below the hub.

Discover Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen Airport, 2019

While the last few posts have discussed Istanbul's old Atatürk Airport, which closed last year to passenger flights, which shifted to the gigantic new airport, the Asian side of the city also has a large international airport: Sabiha Gökçen, which is advertised here by Turkish Airlines, At this particular moment in time, TK was expanding its presence at the secondary base, and at the bottom of this print advert is a list of almost twenty destinations in Europe and the Near East, from Kuwait to London (although it doesn't say which airport). The mention of "Northern Cyprus" likewise does not get specific, but presumably this refers to Ercan International Airport. 

After the opening of the new airport, Turkish re-centralized its mainline operations, and transferred almost all its international flights from SAW to its wholly-owned subsidiary, AnadoluJet. By the end fo the first quarter of 2020, Turkish only served a few domestic routes from SAW, which is dominated by rival low-cost Turkish carrier Pegasus Airlines, which links Istanbul's Asian districts as far as Manchester and Karachi. 

Arrivals at Tirana Mother Teresa Airport, August 2017

All's rather quiet at the main international airport in Albania, Mother Teresa in Tirana, the capital. The mid-afternoon bank of flights is a mix of scheduled flag carriers such as Austrian from Vienna, Air Serbia from Belgrade, and ČSA Czech from Prague, and a smattering of charters from Prague, Venice and Bratislava.

Imperial Airways: The Worldwide Routes, 1937

The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection is one of the world's great cartographic archives; with over 150,000 items in its holdings at Stanford University. Fully searchable and viewable online, it is a wonderful resource. 

The last post, with the global-projection map of Oman Air, has some affinity with the earliest route maps at the down of the pre-war commercial aviation era, specifically this detailed item showing the Air Lines of Imperial Airways in 1937, at an extent which would not be resurrected until after World War Two. 

What is particularly remarkable about this map is how complex it is, with two world projections duplicating similar information, which itself is intertwined with many various, and vaguely articulated 'cooperation' operations carried out by unnamed 'other air transport companies.' 

As expected, the trunk routes of the empire fan out from London, with a trans-European line spanning Central Europe to terminate at Budapest, while a second, trans-Mediterranean line runs from Marseille to Athens to Mirabella (today known as Elounda) in Crete, finally crossing the greater part of the middle sea to reach first Alexandria and then Cairo, from whence the great route begins to touch at way-stations within Britain's various post-Ottoman holdings in the Near East, and ultimately eastward to the major outposts of Empire in India, Malaya, and Australia, as we will see in the next post. 

A second line continues southward toward Luxor, continuing onwards to Sub-Saharan Africa, which a subsequent post will examine in detail.

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. 

EVA Air Network, c. 2010

Continuing to look at the airlines of Taiwan, here is straightforward route map of the Republic of China's secondary carrier, EVA Air, in its signature evergreen. From Taoyuan, long haul operations spread east and west, to Europe and North America; EVA was one of the earliest Asian carriers to land at Seattle and has long served Vancouver as well. (Houston has since been added). 

Amsterdam and Vienna are interesting European destinations, and are still served in an unusual routing via a minihub Bangkok—only Paris is served direct from the home airport. Other notable destinations include the sole antipodean city of Brisbane, and a number of secondary cities in Japan such as Fukuoka, as well as the Osaka—Los Angeles supplementing its direct service from Taipei.

Notably absent from the map is any Mainland China service; EVA Air now flies to 17 cities in the PRC.

ČSA Czechoslovak Airlines: The African Routes, 1968

Fast-forwarding nearly half a century from the last post, but still considering the long history of
ČSA Czechoslovak Airlines. Here is the carrier at its zenith, a four-continent flag carrier hoisting the socialist banner aloft across the globe. This detail from a route map, from about 1968, shows a dense network fanning out from Prague. While much of the quintessential cities of the earliest route spine remain: Belgrade, Zagreb, Warsaw, Budapest, and many more routes radiate outward from Central Europe. The red lines around Vienna and Bratislava are quite dense, clustering at Athens to continue into Asia.

Across the Mediterranean, there are non-stop flights from Ruznye to Algiers and Tunis—Tripoli. Further east, several lines seem to spread out from Geneva, one of which continues southward to Casablanca and then onward to Dakar and Freetown. In a clear echo of Interflug's West African service featured here last month, it seems the post-colonial promises of realignment prompted a Pan-African operation from Prague. Somewhat confusingly, Monrovia, Liberia, is marked in a red circle, but the routing does not connect it. Perhaps a typo? Perhaps meant to indicate Conakry? 

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. 

Interflug Timetable, Winter 1975-76, Part 1

The unscheduled discovery of this Interflug memorial website has gotten us sidetracked in reviewing its treasures. This post celebrates the first half of a photocopy-palletted schedule from November 1975 to March 1976 for routes within Europe and the Middle East, as well as the single transatlantic route, the historically curious twice-weekly Berlin—Gander—Havana service, which probably didn't ferry the freezing Newfoundlanders to sunny Cuba on the way. 

Other flights follow from previously-posted material of earlier years: one of the Iron Curtain spines in the latticework, the Berlin—Leipzig—Erfurt—Budapest—Tirana operation is shown at top, and below it one-off flights to the free world: Milan, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Vienna. Shown below is the all-important to Moscow and Leningrad. The largest box shows four weekly operations to the Near East: to Cairo, to Beirut, and Damascus—Baghdad. 

The next post shows the remaining pages of the schedule. 

Onurair: Now Connecting to Turkey, July 2015

 Just as yesterday's post debuted a secondary Turkish airline connecting at Istanbul, today consists of another inaugural feature on the Timetablist: an advertisement of Onurair, yet another Kemalist carrier with a bland name and even more generic red logo. Marketed to hurried passengers at the tiny passenger terminal at Tegel Airport in Berlin, the poster excites the European traveler who wishes to reach Asia Minor—from large tourism gateways like Izmir, Bodrum and Antalya to more minor Anatolian destinations like Diyarbakir, Kayseri, and Gaziantep, all, apparently via Atatürk Airport. The journey can originate from major European hubs like Amsterdam and Berlin or secondary cities such as Stuttgart and Düsseldorf, to more obscure links such as Odessa and Nicosia. 

Azerbaijan Airlines Destinations, Spring 2015

The curious case of the Azerbaijan Airlines route map, a semi-interactive presentation on the airline's slick web portal. Yellow-gold pegs portrude out from a slate-clay continent, showing destinations as expected as London, Frankfurt, Moscow, Paris, and Dubai and as interesting as Prague, Riga, Tel-Aviv, Tblisi and Minsk. To the north, a number of secondary Russian cities is served, but there's only a weak network southward: the map is equally intriguing for the cities not shown. Only New York and Beijing, new long-haul additions to the network, are not encompassed in this slice of globe.

Air Berlin: The Long-haul Destinations from Munich, summer 2013

A somewhat clever transit-map styling of an Air Berlin wall advert at the Munich Airport U-bahn station, showing the diverse long-haul destinations, which by and large are leisure markets. Four continents are covered: from Phuket and Bangkok in Thailand, and Male in the Maldives, to Mombasa in Kenya and Windhoek in Namibia (the latter two, sadly, seem to have since been dropped from the network). In the Americas, Miami, New York and Los Angeles are complimented by Caribbean resort towns such as Cancún. On the red horizontal line, further sun-and-beach destinations are separated from the more urban trio of Barcelona, Moscow, and Vienna. Strangely, the device isn't carried all the way through, as there is no interchange station in the center where the two lines intersect.

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.

Sabena Network: c.1955

Post-war, pre-jet age Sabena still had an impressive reach, with a dense network in Europe spinning out from the low countries northward to Oslo and Stockholm and east to Prague and Vienna. A single westward push stopped at Shannon before destinations unspecified in North America.

Southward, planes reached the Mediterranean at Nice, and stretched further down to Lisbon where a vague connection to South America is suggested. More articulated is the operation at Rome, with planes splitting off for North Africa,  the first crossing the Sahara to stop at Kano before finally reaching the vast Belgian Congo at Leopoldville. A non-stop from Brussels reached into the upper reaches of the Congo to terminate at Elisabethville and Stanleyville, and a single lined continued all the way down to Johannesburg.

In the east, flights criss-crossed at Athens, only reaching Tel Aviv in the Near East, with another flight to Cairo, which turned down to also reach the eastern cities of the colony.

Sabena: The African Network, 1973

Continuing from the previous post, but focussing on Africa: Belgium has a particular, and outsized, colonial history in Africa, the 20th century era of which is intimately intertwined with the corporate history of Sabena. Here, near the height of the Belgian Airlines extent, the flag carrier flew to fifteen cities south of the Sahara. 

In west Africa, flights from Zaventem National Airport reached Dakar, Conakry, Abidjan, Niamey, Kano and Douala, with interlinking onward service to Monrovia and Lagos. Further into Central Africa lay Kinshasa, surely Sabena's most important African destination, linked from Niamey, Douala in Africa and Brussels and Athens in Europe. It is notable that no other Congolese city was served. 

Athens served as a supra-Mediterranean station for flights to East Africa: Nairobi and Entebbe connected non-stop from Greece, as did an ultra-long haul to Johannesburg. All three were also served non-stop from the home base. Interestingly, Uganda's main airport was also directly connected to Vienna. Kigali and Bujumbura, the capitals of Belgium's other central African former colonies, were only served from Nairobi, with Dar Es Salaam also linked in. 

Special thanks again to Flickr user caribb (Doug from Montreal) for allowing reuse under creative commons licensing. 

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. 

Air Afrique: The schedule from Dakar, 1990

Finishing this Air Afrique week on Timetablist, the schedule from Dakar's Yoff Airport, the multinational airline’s second home. Flights far and wide are displayed here, including cities far outside of the airline’s own network, from Bangkok to Chicago. In Europe, West Berlin and Bucharest are helpfully shown, while Atlanta (connection to Delta or Eastern) and Addis Ababa (connecting to Ethiopian at Abidjan) are featured as well. Special thanks again to Airline Memorabilia for the original posting.

Air Afrique: The schedule from Abidjan, 1990 (continued)

Continuing with Air Afrique's summer 1990 schedule from Abidjan, originally posted on Airline Memorabilia. Here is the second page of the Abidjan schedule:

Alphabetically, the index begins with non-stop flights on UTA French Airlines to Nice on the weekends. Flights within the West African network, to Nouakchott, Ouagadougou,  Pointe Noire (via Brazzaville), and Yaoundé operate just a few times per week on an A-300.

There are near-daily connections to Paris, either in-directly via another Air Afrique city, or direct once weekly on a DC-10, in addition to the non-stop UTA services to CDG.

Interestingly, there is a single Thursday non-stop to Rio de Janeiro on-board VARIG listed. Other flights, to Rome, Stockholm, Tokyo, Toronto, Vienna, Washington (connecting at JFK on Pan Am) and Zürich. The section on Accra starts with flights to Brussels.

Austrian Airlines: Vienna to Chicago, May 2013

One last in this week's series of new international carriers coming to Chicago, particularly those that are a resumption of previous intercontinental flights: The rather strange homepage graphic is from the website of Austrian Airlines, which this month is due to return to Chicago. The move has long been prudent, to feed into the massive mid-continental links of Star Alliance partner United Air Lines.

But the image above rather clumsily suggests connections not via the Midwest but Mittel-Europa; it has always been Austrian Airlines dream to have Vienna serve as a switch-station to points further east, such as here faraway Delhi or nearby Moscow or Kiev. There probably won't be too many US passengers for Minsk, and why anyone would connect from North America to London or Barcelona via Vienna is curious; better off trying the new-nonstop on PIA for Catalonia, for instance.