IRS Airlines Advertisement, c.2007

If Arik Air doesn't offer the right route or a convenient schedule, the Nigerian air traveler's next option, at least a decade ago, might have been the reassuringly named IRS Airlines, which is even more non-Nigerian and strangely American in its livery, with a red-white-and-yellow emblem in the shape of an eagle's head, like a rejected US Postal Service logo, as seen on this magazine advertisement from about ten years ago, which marks the premier of this airline on The Timetablist.

What is not so reassuring is that the airline's Facebook Page has not been updated since 2011, and the airline's website isn't loading. Who knows where the initials came from, but at one point this curious carrier linked much of northern Nigeria, including Kano, Kaduna, Maiduguri, Sokoto, and Yola with Abuja and Lagos as well as southern cities like Benin, Port Harcourt and Owerri.

Aero Contractors: More Routes Now Available, April 2014.

A final Aero Contractors post, from the airline's website, and following on the two previous posts featuring the resurging airline's recent web adverts: this features both a schedule table on routes between Abuja and Kano and return, and Abuja-Asaba-Lagos and return, before a final roundtrip to Kano to end the day at 8:30pm.

To the right, behind the undercroft image of the Aero B737, is a somewhat curious map against a blue sky: seemingly upside-down, with Abuja below Lagos and Asaba, in Delta State, at far left, it also shows Kano between Lagos and Abuja, when it is far to the north.

Arik Air: the domestic destinations, c.2013

A detail from the previous post, showing Arik Air's domestic destinations: twenty cities across Nigeria, from Calabar to Katsina, in addition to the two hubs of Abuja and Lagos. Presumably the network is nearly identical to what has been featured before on the Timetablist, but has never been presented in the lipstick lustre of this ticket office display banner.