Azerbaijan Airlines Timetable, 2016 (Post 2 of 2)

Continuing from the previous post, the second page of Azerbaijan Airlines's inflight magazine shows the airline's pair of domestic routes, from Baku to Ganja, (Gəncə in Azeri) the country's second largest city, in the northwest, and Nakhchivan in Autonomous exclave, separated from Azerbaijan proper by part of Armenia. The two secondary airports are connected to each other  as well, and there is a twice-weekly service to St. Petersburg. The only other service not asterisked as a non-codeshare flight is the twice-weekly Baku-Minsk service. Today, the airline still connects to both domestic cities to Baku's Heydar Aliyev International Airport. 

Azerbaijan Airlines Timetable, 2016 (Post 1 of 2)

Another page from the back of the Azerbaijan Airlines in-flight magazine, which publishes the state carrier's entire schedule—somewhat rare for an airline seat-back pocket. 

The schedule here shows a regular roster of flights to major European airports—once- or twice-weekly services to Barcelona, Berlin, Milan, and Prague, as well as more frequent flights to London (with one of the airline's widebody Dreamliners), Paris, as well as twice-weekly service to Tel Aviv and a flight to Dubai each morning. Elsewhere in Asia is the mid-night service to the Caspian oil town of Aktau, two hours away in Kazakhstan, via an Embraer E190, and the great eastern route: the thrice-weekly B787 Dreamliner service to Beijing. This is complimented by the airline's premier service, the Dreamliner's transatlantic long-haul to New York-JFK.  

AZALJET Timetable, 2016

This may be one of the only timetables published of AZALJET, the low-cost leisure division of AZAL Azerbaijan Airlines, which was announced in February 2016 but folded in to the mainline operations barely a year later. 

AZALJET focused on two regions: The CIS region, especially Russia, including the critical trunk routes of Moscow (interestingly both Vnukovo and Domodedovo airports) and St. Petersburg, as well as Kiev and Lviv in Ukraine; Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, along with Mineralnye Vody, a city of 75,000 in Stavropol region of the Caucasus Mountains which is the last main town on the rail line between Russia and Baku, and makes its Timetablist debut here. 

The second set of routes connects to other regional cities including Tblisi, Georgia and Tabriz, the northwesternmost Iranian city that is almost more Azerbaijani than Persian. There are also a half-dozen Turkish cities, including the important routes to Ankara and Istanbul as well as Mediterranean leisure destinations such as Antalya, Bodrum, and Dalaman. 

The distinction between the main carrier and this low-cost unit was always quite blurred; there was hardly enough time to distinguish the two before AZALJet was closed down. This is reflected in the fleet listed in the right-most column: most flights are with A319s and A320s but there is the occasional B757 to Bodrum and Antalya, two flights per each weekday is operated with a B767, and even an A340 flies on one of the weekly rotations to Antalya until the end of August. 

AZAL Azerbaijan Airlines Network, mid-2016

Following on the previous post, by staying in the trans-Caspian region: here is the route map of another post-Soviet, Central Asian flag carrier, Azerbaijan Airlines, a rather convoluted web of polychrome routes, four different color markers for barely three dozen destinations including an array of code-shares.

Ignoring the third-party services, there are the main line routes themselves—labeled AZAL, the alternative acronym for the state airline—in a dark purple, an eclectic roster of cities across three continents, including, Barcelona, Berlin, Milan, Minsk and Prague in Europe to Dubai and Tel Aviv in southwestern Asia and distant Beijing in the east, shown in an inset at right. On the left, the pride of the operation, the non-stop Dreamliner flight from Baku to New York-JFK, which was almost axed last year.

In red are the leisure destinations of the short-lived AZALJET division, mostly to Aegean Turkey including Istanbul, Izmir, Bodrum, Dalaman, Antalya and Ankara, as well as Aktau, Kazakhstan, Tblisi, Tehran, Kazan, Lviv and Kiev. This unit only existed for barely a year, from March 2016 to 2017, before being folded back in to the central operations. 

Long-Haul Destinations from Berlin, Summer 2015

Like many a good German airport company, the management of Berlin Tegel issues a printed timetable for traveler's reference. As we conclude the present series of posts on operations at Tegel in the Summer of 2015, this map offers an appropriate conclusion. 

There are two many cities here to feature in one or even two posts, and it is not particularly noteworthy that the German capital is connected to some three dozen other cities across Europe. This week we have, however, discussed a bit about the somewhat peculiar circumstances of Berlin's commercial air transportation, still divided between multiple airports, awaiting the long-delayed opening of its 21st century hub.

In the meantime, tiny Tegel, something of the LaGuardia of central Europe, squeezes in only a handful of long-hual flights, in part due to the city's dispersion of air traffic and in part due to the 

centralization of airline operations around Lufthansa's Frankfurt megahub and Munich base. 

Hometown carrier Air Berlin does the city some good turns, particularly the high-prestige widebody services to New York JFK and Chicago O'Hare. United offers the only US Flag appearance, with its 767 flights to Newark (although these are sometimes ignominiously downgraded to narrow body 757s in the winter). Delta Air Lines just announced this month that it will soon return to Tegel, which is symbolically important as Tegel was such an important base for Pan-Am's intra-Europe operations that Delta inherited. Air Berlin also flies to Reykjavík-Keflavík and a number of warm-weather leisure destinations. 

Perhaps more interesting are the handful of airlines connecting eastward to Asia. Azerbaijan Airlines was just recently featured here, and Qatar Airways scored a coup when it beat out Emirates for service to the Gulf—although Etihad snuck in through its ownership stake in Air Berlin, which flies non-stop to Abu Dhabi. Iraqi Airways makes for more fun planespotting, flying to both Erbil and Baghdad. This post is the first time we've featured the Iraqi flag carrier. 

Hainan Airlines added Berlin to its European system in 2012 along with Brussels and Budapest, and connects to Beijing with a A330-200 (rather than one of its Dreamliners). But what is surely the most unusual airline landing in Reinickendorf is MIAT Mongolian Airlines, which has actually long-served Berlin, landing its A310s at Schönefeld since at least the late 1990s. The Mongolian flag carrier currently operates one its gorgeously painted B767-300s via Moscow Sheremetyevo airport, and this post marks its premier on the Timetablist.  Although the airline also flies twice-weekly non-stop to Frankfurt, and once served Prague, Berlin is one its only European gateways. 

Azerbaijan Airlines: Twice Weekly from Berlin to Baku, July 2015

Onurair was not the only airline with an attractive back-lit billboard at Berlin Tegel in the summer 2015. Here, Azerbaijan Airlines goes for a juxtaposition of civic symbols: the historic Brandenburg Tor against the 'iconic' flame towers of nouveau-riche Baku, to advertise its twice-weekly flights between the capitals. 

Dubai: Departures from Terminal 1, January 2015 (cont.)

Continuing from the previous post, the second of two screens-shots gets us from the late noon hour until mid-afternoon. The schedule continues to be dominated by regional and subcontinental flights, with the addition of MEA to Beirut and Royal Jordanian to Amman. PIA has three more operations in the afternoon, and Mahan Air has a second flight to Tehran. 

More exotic flights are sprinkled throughout the time block. Surely the most remarkable is SyrianAir to Latakia, as it is almost unbelievable that the state carrier continues to field its single A320 across the region as much of the country burns. Elsewhere, we find Azerbaijan Airlines to Baku, and TAROM to Bucharest, here referred to only at "Otopeni Intl." The last of the board shows two flight to Moscow: the first on Transaero to "Vnukovo," in what would be the last few months of that enterprise's existence, and a second that at the moment shows a Kenya Airways flight number but is, of course, an Aeroflot operation to Sheremetyevo, which is not specified as the destination airport.

Azerbaijan Airlines Destinations, Spring 2015

The curious case of the Azerbaijan Airlines route map, a semi-interactive presentation on the airline's slick web portal. Yellow-gold pegs portrude out from a slate-clay continent, showing destinations as expected as London, Frankfurt, Moscow, Paris, and Dubai and as interesting as Prague, Riga, Tel-Aviv, Tblisi and Minsk. To the north, a number of secondary Russian cities is served, but there's only a weak network southward: the map is equally intriguing for the cities not shown. Only New York and Beijing, new long-haul additions to the network, are not encompassed in this slice of globe.