Qatar Airways Route Network, November 2016: Australasia

We end our examination of the global network of Qatar Airways back where we started: its Australian services, with non-stop flights to four Aussie cities. Perhaps more worthy of note is the recent development of the incredible, 18-hour Doha—Auckland non-stop, which, however briefly, would be the world's longest non-stop flight, if and when its launch is no longer under delay. Currently, Emirates Dubai—Auckland holds the title. 

Qatar Airways: Daily to Adelaide, May 2016

In continuing to look at the airlines of the Gulf, we necessarily turn to Qatar Airways, which is today almost as much a global benemoth as its archrival, Emirates, based just 278km due east of Doha. 

Qatar has capitalized on its geolocation in the same manner as Emirates, and this includes competing on the Kangaroo routes from Europe to Australia, although its challenging to match the partnership of between Emirates and Qantas. 

Of Qatar Airways's relentless expansion which continued in 2016, daily service to Adelaide began in May with a brand-new A350. The surfboard motif is here used to show the map of the continental nation, each board with one of Qatar's four Australian destinations. 

Emirates Route Map, August 2016: The Global Routes

Since last year, Emirates undertook a redesign of their increasingly-complex route map. This stunning, dynamic work of pseudo-Dymaxion cartography is the result.

Over the next week, each page and inset of the route map will be posted in detail. This is page one, showing the red superhighways of superjumbos bolting out of Dubai like a network of refinery pipelines (fitting for a Gulf carrier). Africa, East Asia and Australasia are shown fully; South Asia and the Middle East are blank. Likewise, Europe is left mostly empty, except as it indicates the trans-Atlantic routes, which are shown passing polarwise for North America and in a trans-equatorial conduit across central Africa.

This map best represents the far Asian routes from Beijing to Bangkok and, as was discussed in the last post, the megadarrier's predominance in the Southeast Asia—Australia market and the trans-Tasman airspace, the interconnections between Bangkok and Singapore and the major Australian cities, and onward to Auckland.

Australian National Airways Routes, c.1950

A DC-4 zooms across the dry expanse of the antipodean continent in this vintage route map of the long-gone Australian National Airways. The quad-motor Douglas aircraft only entered the fleet after World War II, and shortly before the airline's demise in a fiercely-competitive market. Although this pamphlet highlights the major national route, Sydney-Melbourne, in red, the airline stretches from Cairns in northern Queensland to Hobart in Tasmania and extends from Adelaide to Perth via the outback station of Kalgoorlie. The remnants of its operations were later folded into Ansett in the mid-1950s.

Aircalin Network, 2011

A much sleeker interface greets the visitor to Aircalin's 2011 website, compared to the grainy réseau of just three years earlier, shown in the previous post. The only major addition to the network is Seoul, suggesting the increasing importance of Asian visitors to the archipelago. Wallis and Futuna are shown as separate nodes, showing a link between the two fellow francophone islands.

Beyond this, the carte includes cooperative networks with (unspecified) Australian and New Zealand carriers to other antipodean cities via Sydney, Brisbane and Auckland, demonstrating how easily Aircalin's network can be reached via these gateways. The new map also shows more distant destinations at its edges: Honolulu, Ho Chi Minh Ville, and Hong Kong; Shanghai and Singapour, Bali and Bangkok, and even Los Angeles, suggesting an expansionary eye toward linking New Caledonia with California, and China.

Air Nauru Network, c.2006

A sketchy .gif pixellation of the terminal Air Nauru system in 2006, its last year of operations, via this website. With a recently-leased B737-400, stretching at least occasionally as far as Manila and Melbourne (although not Hong Kong or Honolulu) and some sort of cooperative arrangement with Qantas (note how Sydney is bypassed), Air Nauru could almost be thought to have been re-peaking from to its previous glory days on the 1980s, when it was the great connecting carrier of the equatorial Pacific. Unfortunately, just mere months after this map was computer-drawn, the single jet was seized by Australian authorities at Melbourne over a tax dispute. Air Nauru was finished.

Air Asia X: The Long Haul Network, c.2010-12

Interrupting the relentless mining of Flickr user caribb's trove, as a tangent about Southeast Asian leisure services from the recent post on the vintage Qantas route map revealed the above, somewhat mysterious image. Source here.

What is curious about this item is that Air Asia X neither serves these routes at present, nor does trusty Wikipedia confirm this web of destinations as either present or erstwhile, in its index. Its not entirely clear whether these routes has been announced or planned, or if this is just wishful thinking. Milan and Budapest, Paris, and Christchurch have all been announced or active since 2010, but are not shown here.