Air Astana: Nine Times Weekly from Dubai to Almaty, late 2019

A print advertisement for the Kazakhstani flag carrier, Air Astana, promoting the airline's ample schedule of services from Dubai to Almaty, the country's business hub and former political capital. The text also mentions 5 weekly flights from Dubai to Astana, the country's newer capital, built in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the central steppes of the vast Central Asian nation with landmarks by Norman Foster. More recently,  the capital was renamed Nur-Sultan in early 2019 in honor of the country's long-time dictator leader who retired—resulting in the curious circumstance that the state airline will continue to use the older name, which it had originally adopted to promote the new capital (itself named for the crown of a traditional Kazakh hurt) when it was built,  while the city itself is no longer called Astana. 

At the bottom of the paragraph of text, a few other destinations are listed to promote Air Astana as a regional connector: the regional capital Atyrau, as well as Shymkent, Tashkent, capital of neighboring Uzbekistan, Moscow, and Dushanbe, Tajikistan. 

The editorial board of the Timetablist has taken the situation under review, and in keeping with long-standing policy, is debuting the tag Nur-Sultan, while continuing to also use the separate tag Astana for ease of reference. New guidance is always issued at the Keywords Note, should there be any changes. 

Etihad Route Map, September 2016: the Near Asian & East African Routes

Picking up from where we left off before the end of the year, when we had exhaustively examined the redesign of Emirates Airline's route map, here is the example of its counterpart, barely 130 kms down the national highway in Abu Dhabi: Etihad, officially the national airline of the UAE. 

The smaller but, if anything, more luxurious rival connects its home base to six continents, shown here and in the next several posts of this week with an examination of its rather pedestrian route map from the September edition of its in-flight publication. 

Starting in this post, the routes radiate out from Abu Dhabi, as does every single flight of the airline. The airlines geographic extent mirrors, in lesser form, the six-continent coverage of its rival. All the usual regional capitals are served, but more often with narrow-body A320s than with the widebodies of Emirates. Equally well-covered are the south Asian gateways, economically important but also bridges to the vast majority of the UAE's foreign labor force.

We will look further east in Asia in the next few posts, but for now it is interesting to note the strong appearances in Kazakhstan. While a number of airlines fly to Almaty, the former capital and large commercial center, it is somewhat rarer to also service Astana, the new-built capital on the steppes. 

With far fewer routes to Africa than Emirates, Etihad has but one interesting distinction, if not exactly an advantage: its non-stop flight to Mahe is in cooperation with Air Seychelles, in which Eithad acquired a 40% stake.

Uzbekistan Airways: The International Network, c.2003-2008

In sharp contrast to the photo-generated graphics of the domestic routes, this iteration of Uzbekistan Airway's international network is a sharp, simple white-on-blue. Found on this antique Central Asian tourism website, it dates most likely to the middle of the last decade.

The broad reach of Uzbekistan Airways features fantastic array of destinations of four continents, most especially the flagship Tashkent-Riga-New York route: this pride-of-the-network HY101 survives to this day. There are a great many Russian destinations, and service to many of the Central Asian capitals: Almaty, Astana, Bishkek, Ashgabad, and Baku. One might put the flight to Urumqi, capital of Chinese Turkestan, in this same category. Seven other European airports are included, including Athens and Istanbul. More randomly are flights to Seoul, Osaka, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. Delhi is only less surprising than Lahore and Amritsar, while Jeddah, Dubai, Sharjah and Tel-Aviv round out the Middle East.

Looking at the roster from Wikipedia, a great many of these more random cities survive within the network today.

Austrian Airlines: Routes East from Vienna, 2011

As mentioned in yesterday's post, Austrian Airlines still has a Near Eastern presence, but a with a different profile from a quarter-century ago. Here, on an increasingly-ordinary Innosked information interface is Austrian Airlines's international routes across Asia. The airline reaches as far as Bangkok, Beijing and Tokyo but has more routes in the Near East, from Tel Aviv to Tehran, and Amman to Dubai, but also including less common cities such as Baku and Yerevan. Most notably, Austrian has been among the few and first to serve Baghdad, and remains one of only two European airlines flying to Erbil in the Kurdish north (the other being Lufthansa).

A number of leisure cities are shown, from Larnaca in Cyprus to Male in the Maldives. The latter is formerly part of the portfolio of the previously-independent but still distinct Lauda Air, prior to its takeover into the flag carrier, when longer-range services to Asia were transferred to the parent. Some of the destinations in Turkey and Egypt shown here are actually served by Lauda, not Austrian.

Air Astana: International Routes, 2011

From the interactive route map at Air Astana's website. The national airline of Kazakhstan is named after the country's new capital, although confusingly the airline's central hub continues to be the older, larger, erstwhile capital, Almaty. Air Astana uses a combination of Airbus A320, B757 and B767 aircraft to link Almaty to London, Amsterdam, Istanbul, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, China, Russia, Delhi, Abu Dhabi and several regional and domestic destinations. The city of Astana itself is, according to Wikipedia, linked to Istanbul, Frankfurt, Moscow, Urumqi, Novosibirsk, Abu Dhabi, and Yekaterinburg, and seasonally to Hanover, although this is not shown on the airline's website.