Arrivals at Tirana Mother Teresa Airport, August 2017

All's rather quiet at the main international airport in Albania, Mother Teresa in Tirana, the capital. The mid-afternoon bank of flights is a mix of scheduled flag carriers such as Austrian from Vienna, Air Serbia from Belgrade, and ČSA Czech from Prague, and a smattering of charters from Prague, Venice and Bratislava.

Austrian Airlines: Vienna to Chicago, May 2013

One last in this week's series of new international carriers coming to Chicago, particularly those that are a resumption of previous intercontinental flights: The rather strange homepage graphic is from the website of Austrian Airlines, which this month is due to return to Chicago. The move has long been prudent, to feed into the massive mid-continental links of Star Alliance partner United Air Lines.

But the image above rather clumsily suggests connections not via the Midwest but Mittel-Europa; it has always been Austrian Airlines dream to have Vienna serve as a switch-station to points further east, such as here faraway Delhi or nearby Moscow or Kiev. There probably won't be too many US passengers for Minsk, and why anyone would connect from North America to London or Barcelona via Vienna is curious; better off trying the new-nonstop on PIA for Catalonia, for instance.

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.

Austrian Airlines: Vienna-Riyadh, October 1986

Lufthansa has not been the only German-speaking airline serving the Gulf states. Here, Austrian Airlines links Vienna to Riyadh, beginning in 1986. Incredibly, this was operated using a narrow-body MD-82, hardly a spacious option for such a long fight.

Its also remarkable that the cancellation stamp shows the 1971-era striped water tower, which in the 1980s was Riyadh's only modern landmark (surely today with iconic Kingdom Centre or Al Faisaliyah skyscraper would be used). Austrian still serves a number of cities in the Middle East, but Riyadh is not currently one of them.

Brussels Airlines: Routes to Africa, November 2011

Similar to yesterday's post, this interactive map is from Austrian Airlines's website but shows its Star Alliance sister, Brussels Airlines, and its routes to Africa.

The route lines themselves are delightfully stylized into bouquet-like bunches, but do not reflect actual flight patterns from Brussels, which often triangulate between two African cities and Belgium, such as Abidjan and Monrovia.

Other cities which are marked but not named indicate the destinations of yet other Star Alliance Partners, as well as Brussels Airlines itself-- no less than its premiere African destination, Kinshasa, is not labeled here, perhaps suggesting that Austrian does not codeshare on the route. BMI, which reaches Freetown in West Africa and Addis Ababa in the east, is also shown in the key at the far bottom left as a possible partner.

Note that Brussels is closing its Accra station one month from the date of this post--its rare that a route to Africa, especially booming Ghana, is not a success.