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 Schedules from Paris and Pointe-Noire, 1990

Continuing from the previous post, the schedule from Air Afrique to and from Paris CDG rounds out, followed by the schedule from Pointe-Noire, the Republic of Congo's coastal petrol capital.

Non-stop fights from Charles de Gaulle reach N'Djamena, Nouakchott, Niamey and Ouagadougou, as well as Rome, interestingly, an intermediate stop of RK011 to Dakar, shown in the previous post. Domestic connections to Nouadhibou on Air Mauritanie and to Yamoussoukro on Air Ivoire are shown.

Flights from Brazzaville and Lomé link to Pointe-Noire, one of Air Afrique's southernmost destinations. The schedule helpfully provides links to European destinations such as Nice, Geneva, Marseille, London, Cologne, Frankfurt, Brussels and Bordeaux; three of the connections from Brazzaville’s Maya Maya International Airport are listed on the DeHavilland DHC-6, or the Fokker F-28 and F-27 metal of Lina Congo, the obscure domestic airline of the Republic of the Congo. All three national airlines mentioned here (along with Air Afrique itself, of course) are now defunct.

Special thanks to the wonderful website Airline Memorabilia for the original posting. 

Air Afrique: The schedule from Paris, 1990

Our second Air Afrique week continues, as does the cross-posting from Airline Memorabilia of the mid-1990 schedule from Air Afrique. This page rounds out the last of the Ouagadougou connections and starts the listings to and from Paris Charles de Gaulle, the premier destination for the multinational airline. Near-daily DC-10s departed from the primary hubs of Abidjan and Dakar (the schedule includes UTA DC-10s and B747s), while connections to Accra on Ghana Airways are shown below. UTA and Air Afrique also shared direct and on-stop connections from Bamako, Bangui, and Brazzaville.

Same-plan service as well as interline connections via the bigger gateways are shown for Cotonou and Lomé, while other airlines provide connections to Conakry, Lagos and Monrovia. Interestingly, service to secondary French cities such as Bordeaux and Marseille are shown as non-stops, meaning Air Afrique A300s and DC-10s landed in Southern France before reaching Roissy.

Air Afrique: The Schedule from New York, 1990

Continuing with Air Afrique week, and continuing with the pages of the airline's 1990 schedule first posted by Airline Memorabilia, the services to New York, the airline's only American destination. 

Air Afrique's twice-weekly DC-10 flights from Dakar to New York-JFK were the pride of it's network, even more so than the flights to metropolitan France. Here we see the full operation of both services, which originate in Abidjan on Wednesdays and Saturdays, both stopping at Dakar's Yoff Airport before crossing the Atlantic. Interestingly, the mid-week flight stops in Monrovia's Roberts International Airport; while the connection between Liberia and the U.S. is obvious, it was neither francophone nor a member of the Air Afrique consortium.

Aside from Abidjan/Dakar connections to Cotonou, Lomé, Bamako, Lagos and Niamey, the New York schedule suggests a number of connections not via Dakar, but on a trans-atlantic Air France B747 to CDG, which shows the various Air Afrique DC-10 flights to Brazzaville, Bangui, and N'Djamena. Intra-African links are also suggested on Ghana Airways to Accra and Air Gabon to Libreville.

Special thanks to the excellent Airline Memorabilia blog for allowing re-posting of this unique item.

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.

Air Afrique: Schedule from Abidjan, 1990

The remainder of this Air Afrique Week will be devoted to reposting pages from the airline's timetable from mid-1990, which was originally posted by our friends at the Spanish-language Airline Memorabilia site.

Here is a page of the superhub schedule: flights out of Abidjan's Port Bouet Airport, the airline's busiest operating base. Non-stop flights within the consortium's network include a litany of A-300 flights to nearby Lomé and Niamey and two-stop service to Douala and Libreville, while other flights in West Africa include a single non-stop DC-10 flight to Lagos and Monrovia, once per week, which, although just next door, are as frequent as the DC-10 services to Geneva, Lyon and Marseille. The pride-of-network, twice weekly trans-Atlantic flights to New York-JFK are at right. Milan, Munich, Manchester, Moscow, London and Montreal are also shown, along with other connecting services to as nearby as N'Djamena and as distant as Los Angeles.

Air Afrique, Geneva-Douala, November 1969

Lomé was not the only capital of Air Afrique's home network that was linked to Geneva. Despite the similarity in the envelope's design from the previous post, particularly the central bar of text announcing the first flight, this announcement for DC-8 service from Douala is from ten years previous, November 1969.

The illustration at left is less urban but far more classically evocative; rather than an architectural symbol of an international organization, a leopard rests in a bouquet of palm fronds underneath two swaying coconut trees, as a golden jet whisks across the sky.

Air Afrique: Lomé-Geneva, Geneva-Lomé, October 1979

Air Afrique closed the 1970s by expanding beyond the metropole, with flights to the capital of francophone Switzerland, Geneva. This premier flight from Lomé, rather than its major hubs at Abidjan or Dakar, and used a wide body DC-10, as noted at the top of the envelope.

The United Nations figures prominently, taking up half of the sheaf, with a lithographic print of a modernist chapel on the pair.

Air Afrique Week 2014

It's been three years since Timetablist's first Air Afrique week, in March 2011. With a backlog of archival material, it seems time to host another week-long celebration of francophone West Africa's super carrier.

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.

BOAC: The Speedbird Routes Across the World, c.1950

The might of the empire spans the newsprint continents in this vintage route map of BOAC. Trunks routes out of London connect five continents, with a major trunk route crossing the Mediterranean at Malta, heading east to Cairo, Basra, Bahrain and Karachi, where the routes splits north along a Delhi-Calcutta-Rangoon-Bangkok axis, turning northeast to terminate at Hong Kong, while a second route reaches far southeast to Singapore, stopping intermittently at Surabaya, somewhat surprisingly, then into Antipodea at Darwin, finally reaching Sydney, where Tasman Empire Airways connects to Auckland. 

The next post will detail the African and North Atlantic routes. 

Bouraq Network, c.1970

Despite the drab analog appearance, this monochrome type-written document, diagramming the network of Bouraq Airlines, is so evocative of its vintage. It could not have been created far from the Indonesian airline's founding in 1970, possibly punched out on a clanging Olivetti in a sweltering tropical office, shaded by shutters and stirred by ceiling fans. It somehow fits the airline's atmosphere, with its aged fleet emblazoned with vintage markings.

The document itself shows Bouraq's base at Balikpapan on Borneo, with links spanning across the Kalimantan provinces, eastward out to nearby Celebes, connecting to Ujung Pandang and beyond and at the bottom of the page reaching the huge cities of Java, Surabaya, Semarang, and Bandung, and as far away as the nation's capital, Jakarta.

Bouraq would remain the humongous archipelago's primary independent domestic airline until its demise in 2005.

Thai Smile Advertisement, early 2013

An advertisement for THAI Smile, a low-cost subsidiary of Thai Airways founded in 2012, which flies an all-A320 fleet from Bangkok across Thailand, but stretches as far east as Macau, and offers international flights from Phuket to Mumbai, Ahmedabad, “New Delhi,” and Kuala Lumpur.

Thai Airways International Routes, 2013 (cont.)

A continuation of the previous post, showing Thai Airways international destinations across Asia, Europe, and Australia, from Kathmandu to Kunming and Manila to Melbourne to Milan.

Thai Airways: International Routes table, 2013

Similar to the table provided in South African Airways' inflight magazine, Thai Airways provides a listing of its international destinations from Bangkok, with distances, flight duration, local time at a local reservations phone number.

Thai Airways: the Western Long-Haul routes, 2013

The result of the explosive growth of tourism to Thailand in the last three decades has resulted in Thai Airways serving an unusually large array of European airports for such a distant destination. This luscious, orchid-colored route map, from Thai Airway's in-flight magazine from last year, shows more than half a dozen non-stops to Europe, from common megahubs like London, Paris, and Frankfurt, to secondary cities like Madrid, Zürich, Munich, Moscow and Milan, to cold-weather gateways like Brussels, Oslo, Copenhagen and Stockholm which have fewer intercontinental services.

Outside of Europe, Thai is one of a handful of Asian carriers to fly to Johannesburg, and on the extreme right-hand side of the page the flights to Dubai and Muscat (the latter via Karachi) are shown.