SAS: The Worldwide Routes, 1960

In looking at the 21st century SAS, we can compare yesterday's subject to same airline at the height of its global reach. 

One the more regal route maps to ever grace the Timetablist, this magnificent, dynamic cartography exemplifies an earlier era the grandeur of the jet age is reflected in the eloquence of this graphic design. A so-called “spiral-polar projection,” which was “created especially for Scandinavian Airlines System to illustrate its worldwide routes,” are the only notations to the map. 

A quad-jet whisks its way into the high atmosphere, the might of its propulsion sweeps up the landmasses themselves, with far Siberia pulled away from the surface of the planet. The very latitudes of the global are twisted into the vortex of the jetliner's contrail. 

Upon the surface of these landmasses, thick red lines spread outward from Northern Europe to five continents. At the outer limits of the first generation jetliner's range, an impressive Oslo—Los Angeles was achieved, and lasted for decades, which as mentioned yesterday only came back in March 2016. Montreal and New York (the latter via Glasgow, it seems) were the only other North American destinations.

South America was, somewhat incredibly, more thoroughly covered, with the system's Lisbon—Recife—Rio de Janeiro—Sao Paulo—Montevideo—Buenos Aires—Santiago service. Africa was also served with a classic east African spine, Rome—Athens—Cairo—Khartoum—Nairobi—Johannesburg. None of these South American or African cities are served today. 

In addition to a half-dozen Near Eastern cities, SAS operated a trans-Asian trunk route to rival those of other European aviation pioneers, with a scissors-base at Karachi linking to Calcutta—Rangoon—Bangkok, which split to either Jakarta or onward to Manila—Tokyo, which swung northward to Anchorage to return to Copenhagen, here transgressing the print's nautilus-shell projection of the globe. 

Image via the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.

Lufthansa: The Worldwide Network, mid-1973

 

A recent post referenced the famous Lufthansa Spinnernetz Streckenatlas, which brought to our editorial attention that we had overlooked posting one of the more legendary graphics of Timetable History. Here is the 1973 version, courtesy of the perennially superb collection of Flickr user Caribb. 

As its base, the map is a unique, polar-focused pseudo-Azimuthal projection, showing all continents but with the Pacific meridians hooking back away from the globe's infinite edge into the north pole. The network itself is given an even more liberal representation, made up of just ten enormous trunk routes, intersecting at the center of the map over Germany (but, interestingly, not specifically mentioning any Deutsche Stadt).

Foreign and overseas destinations are listed in neat columns as these thick ribbons pass near to them: Singapore and Jakarta are skirted, not passed over, on the way to Sydney (Lufthansa left Australia decades ago). A single line from Philadelphia to Quito hits Nassau, Kingston and Bogota, meeting up with some sort of Europe–Caracas route before reaching the Andean way stations. A small offshoot links to Mexican destinations, including Monterrey and Merida, which are also of course no longer served.  The transpolar route from Germany to Anchorage makes right angle with Germany—Bangkok; a semi-circle of Hong Kong—Osaka(Itami)—Tokyo(Haneda)—Anchorage makes the grapefruit quarter.

Other images from caribb's Flickr stream show a fleet of DC-8s and 707s in heavy rotation, assisted by the brand-new B747s in the fleet. The next post will detail the African and South American Cone destinations.

As it has so many times in the past, Timetablist would like to express its appreciation for Flickr user caribb (Doug from Montreal)'s incredible collection, and to say thanks  for allowing the reuse of these images under creative commons.

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. 

Scheduled Passenger Routes from Hawaii, 1971: East of the Dateline

A fun artifact from the State Department of Transportation (of Hawaii, presumably) studying the transocean air links of the archipelago. Most flights are indeed from Honolulu. This first post tags the eastbound services to the US West Coast and Vancouver, to Alaska due north, and across to Mexico, as well as inter-Polynesian flights to Tahiti and Samoa. The flights to Acapulco in particular are interesting, as no long-haul flights exist from this fading resort town today.

The only drawback of this representation is it leads the reader to guess which of the airlines listed in box at upper left serve which routes. Some are easy to discern. Several others, such as Western Airlines, TWA, and UTA, no longer fly anywhere.

The next post will detail the westbound flights to Micronesia, Melanesia, Australia, and Asia.

Hawaiian Airlines Route Map, 1987

Yet another delight from Departed Flights, this wonderfully-vintage Hawaiian Airlines route map from 1987, showing the small airline bridging the Pacific from Anchorage to Apia, and interesting mix of ferrying West Coast vacationers to the islands, interlinking the archipelago state, and linking the tiny isles of Polynesia with Honolulu, the central Pacific metropolis. Note that most of the Hawaiian destinations are labeled by the islands, not the airports.

Northwest Airlines: The Oriental Route, c.1953-54

This isn't the first example shown on Timetablist of Northwest Orient's famous span over the brow of the planet was a consistent feature in its promotional advertising during its golden age of post-war expansion. Decades before United, Delta or American crossed the international date line, the red routes of the stratocruisers swarmed over the rim of the Pacific in a great arc, connecting New York and Washington with the junk-crossed harbor of Hong Kong and the neon lights of Tokyo.

In between, Northwest linked the industrial belt of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee and Chicago with the prairies of Minnesota and Alberta and the Cascades, at Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland, from whence it connected to the exotic isles of Hawaii, not yet a state. Connection service is shown down the California coast, but apparently this was beyond the extent of Northwest's route authorities in the 1950s.

Lufthansa Worldwide, 1971

This sharp web is a unique delineation of the standard route map that Lufthansa employed in its Streckenatlas for many years. City names are clustered together where possible, and the red lines themselves only vaguely suggest the actual flight paths,

The resulting Anchorage-Germany-Bangkok trigonometry at the center is lovely; but in other areas it is a bit confusing. For instance, were there really three paths from Germany to Santiago, and two separate flights that terminated at Johannesburg?

Its interesting to examine the list of Near-East cities (Kuwait, Jeddah, Dhahran) common in the day, where popular contemporary way stations (Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha) are absent. Also, note the lack of Sunbelt Cities, only Los Angeles is served outside of the Northeastern US.

Northwest, the Polar Routes, c. 1954

Polar Projected Maps are somehow alluringly dynamic, especially when spanned by the daring navigations of the pioneering airlines of the post-war era. In this category, none is a better example than Northwest Orient, a carrier which early on challenged the limits of American intercontinental contact with an intrepidation rivaled only by the exotic ports of Pan Am.

Northwest has stayed true to its patron cities, as forty and fifty years on, NWA is still strong in Detroit, Minneapolis, Seattle, Milwaukee, and keeps its mighty Pacific hub at Tokyo (although now out at Narita, when at the time it was at Haneda).

The above Asiatic route crests at Anchorage, and with seemingly-necessary stops at the tiny, frigid island airstrips at Shemya and Chitose, before plunging down the rim of the Pacific to arrive at Tokyo, with an onward network spanning to Okinawa, Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Manila.

Northwest has a rich and proud history, which somewhat sadly is in the process of being painted over in Delta's livery, which swallowed NWA for its strong Asian presence, particularly its Tokyo hub.