Sudan Airways: 20th Anniversary Cover, December 1967

The Imperial Airways posts this week concluded back in the historic Sudan, colocating with this colorful Sudanese envelope from thirty years later. The tri-color celebratory cover itself offers the route map of Sudan Airways, with twelve destinations from London to Beirut to Nairobi shown in bright, wide red bands, while a dozen other airfields, mostly configured in a latitudinal axis from Fort Lamy to Jeddah to Aden, seem secondary in blue. There isn't a map legend to fully explain the distinction, however. 

A quadrant of dynamic scenes, the fleet of the state carrier, soars out of the more multicolored philately at top right: a DC-3 hums across a Nilotic sunset scene; beneath, a Fokker F-27 friendship as it rides over a purple landscape, a group of nomadic camel herders below. At lower right, all the superior speed of the flagship Comet 4C accelerates into rows of contrails, what seem to be the greens and blues of the very contours of the continents rush by in a blur. 

Qatar Airways Route Network, November 2016: the Near East

The route map from a recent copy of Qatar Airways's Oryx in-flight magazine is rendered in a delightful mosaic style which disregards national borders or indeed physical topography. While the coastlines of continents are faithfully represented in detail, the landmasses almost look to be assembled in stained glass. 

Overlaid on these overlapping watercolors are the close-laid threads of Qatar Airways vast, six-continent network, today one the very largest of any of the world's airlines. The grey strokes flow outward from Doha in graceful parallels, almost like strands of baleen. 

Over the next week, we will examine this vast route map in detail, but begin here at the center of the map, which shows destinations of the greater Near East, such as the dense service to Mesopotamia and the Caucus. We will look at the huge number of European routes in the following post.  

Lufthansa: Lost Destinations from the Summer of 2012

For space considerations, the other (non-Russian) worldly destinations that have lost their Lufthansa patronage since 2012 have been cordoned into this separate post. There are three continents hosting less Lufthansa than before, but the only mainline European city that is out is tiny Trondheim, Norway (a first for the Timetablist here), which was curiously served once a week by an aging B737-400.

Asia has been particularly affected: the long-haul connections to Jakarta (via Singapore) and Kuala Lumpur  (via Bangkok) could consistently work. More recently, Lufthansa has lost out to the Gulf three, and curtailed its dedicated flight to Abu Dhabi, and truncated the Muscat extension of its Frankfurt-Riyadh flights (although LX243, the Zürich-Dubai-Muscat connection on SWISS listed here, still operates today).

More dire but less surprising are the loss of further African services: no news that Tripoli has been abandoned, and Pointe-Noire's petrol-club PrivatAir B737-800 service via Libreville had its run, but less happy the abandonment of once-promising Asmara and long-served Khartoum, surely and sadly uneconomic nowadays.  Also, lamentably, Caracas has likewise sunk into a less-viable abyss and receives fewer and fewer international airlines.  Lufthansa closed down its Venezuelan outpost in May this year. 

Alitalia: The African Routes & Schedules, 1973.

A detail of the previous post, originally put up at Airline Memorabilia, showing the astonishing array of African routes operated by Alitalia forty-one years ago.

The jagged cartography reveals a busy system, with almost all flights were out of Rome, although the second line to Dakar links directly to Milan, which continued on to South America. The rest of West Africa is well served by individual flights to Abidjan, Accra, and Lagos, with an onward connection to Douala. Airline Memorabilia scanned in the full schedule, which shows a quad-jet fleet of DC-8s, B707s and even VC-10s humming across the Sahara to seventeen cities.

East Africa was even more thoroughly interconnected, with four routes from Rome, including the curious Athens-Entebbe-Lusaka; two which covered the colonial connections to the Horn of Africa: Jeddah-Asmara-Addis Ababa and Khartoum-Addis Ababa-Mogadishu, and finally a plunging trans-Indian Ocean route: Nairobi-Dar Es Salaam-Antananarivo-Mauritius. In the schedule below, a footnote helpfully details that connections are available at Dar to/from the Comores Islands.

The cone of Africa was by comparison only lightly linked, with a Nairobi-Johannesburg and a Kinshasa-Johannesburg route. The third link to Jo'berg, a long-haul nonstop from Fiumicino.

Of all these cities, Alitalia only serves Accra and Lagos today.

Ethiopian Airlines: the Gateway Route, c.1965

Decades before it spanned to five continents, Ethiopian Airlines was still a leading carrier, yet with a more modest reach. This vintage advert from a mid-century magazine emphasizes Ethiopian's Frankfurt-Athens-Cairo-Asmara-Addis Ababa-Nairobi axis, flown overnight aboard the luxurious DC-6B. The Queen of Sheba's secondary east-west routes to Khartoum, Djibouti and Aden are also shown.

Ethiopian Airlines: The Wonderland Route to Kenya, c.1955

In the colonial era, when only Ethiopia was not under European control, Ethiopian Airlines flew its DC-6s on the "Wonderland Route" between Addis Ababa and Nairobi in the Kenya Colony. Also advertised are Aden, Djibouti, Egypt (presumably Cairo), Sudan (surely Khartoum), Eritrea (likely Asmara), Pakistan (possibly Karachi), Saudi Arabia and "East Africa." Shown on the cover of this brochure is an office block labeled "America House" which is presumably Ethiopian's office in pre-independence Nairobi. Exact date of the item is unknown.

Ethiopian Airlines Network, c.1972

Via this website, it is a colorful brochure espousing the wonders of the Hidden Empire, including this straightforward network map of the flag carrier. Ethiopian then reached 18 international destinations in Europe, Asia and spanning the African continent from Asmara to Abidjan and Dar Es Salaam to Douala.

The domestic map shows an enormous coverage within the diverse country, with more than 40 destinations from the Red Sea to the Blue Nile, most served at the time with DC-3 aircraft-- as the brochure states, the flagship B707s, shown in the above image on the apron at Addis Ababa Bole Airport, were reserved for the intercontinental services to Delhi and Rome.

Ethiopian Airlines Network, c.1960

Appearing almost like the fuzzy felt of a drinks coaster, this map of Ethiopian Airlines mid-century network is a warm and wonderful scene, showing the African continent between a green and red band, like the imperial flag of Ethiopia itself, with the lion of Judah in the southern Atlantic at the lower left of the graphic.

A main North-South route runs between Nairobi and Cairo. A lateral route links Monrovia via Accra and Lagos. Presumably, the two lines angling down the cone of Southern Africa terminate at Johannesburg, but this is not specified, and neither is the significance of the thin lines versus the thick red bolts, which quite curiously cross not at Addis Ababa but at Khartoum. The Monrovia-Conakry-Dakar portion is also a striped hash line, perhaps suggesting that this trunk was not underway but was a future intention. Timbuktu is shown but seemingly not part of the network.

Above the Mediterranean, a rather random assortment of gateways are served: Lisbon, Athens, Frankfurt and Beirut. Aden is linked to Asmara, with promises of more of Asia off to the right of the map. A tiny arrow of the coast of Cap Vert suggests trans-Atlantic connections to the Americas.

Ethiopian Airlines: Systemwide Network, 1971

A bright red route map of an earlier Ethiopian Airlines, long before it had reached China or the United States, but when it was already a pioneer in African aviation.

On its home continent, Ethiopian stretched to Abidjan and Accra in the west, and only as far as Dar Es Salaam in the south. Sizable stations existed at Khartoum, Asmara, and, of course, Addis Ababa. Rome was linked with these three as the primary European destination, as it is today. Paris, Frankfurt and Athens were also within its web, the latter direct from Asmara or via Cairo.

Although Far Eastern points were beyond its reach at the time, the airline already served an array of Asian cities: Karachi, Delhi, and, interestingly, two cities in Yemen: Taiz and Aden. Only Delhi is still a destination, forty years later.

Egyptair: the African Routes, 2011

Egyptair has long had a strong presence in connecting the continent's largest city and its headquarters, Cairo, with the rest of Africa. This includes three cities in Nigeria, as well as the city of Juba, capital of South Sudan, which has just recently voted for independence.

BOAC: East Africa & The Horn

Another spread from the BOAC's 1960 atlas, this one showing the connections south of Cairo, namely Khartoum, Entebbe, Nairobi, and, interestingly, an offshoot to Asmara ending at Aden, but not the larger Addis Ababa. Southward routes continue to Salisbury (Harare) and Johannesburg.

United Arab Airlines, c. 1965

United Arab Airlines, which was a short-lived iteration of what is today Egyptair, had a strong network of African and Arabian Routes in its day, including several down the Nile and into East Africa, and a single, trans-Saharan span, with stops at Fort-Lamy, Kano, Lagos, and terminating at Accra. Accra and Lagos are served today, a major connection between the Middle East and West Africa. The exact date of this route map is unknown, but is obviously after the dissolution of the brief union with Syria.