British Caledonian Schedule, 1977

A few pages from the timetable of British Caledonian Airways in 1977, demonstrating the breadth of its reach at the height of its operations, reaching on its own metal to Banjul while codesharing extensively with Air Afrique, Air France, and UTA Overseas French Airlines to Abidjan, Abu Dhabi, Bangui, and Baghdad with other connections to Bangkok and Bahrain on other carriers such as Singapore, KLM, Qantas, Gulf Air, and Thai Airways. The flight to Barbados is a rare bit of history: IQ2/IQ4 was a Martinair Holland DC-10 flying for the old Caribbean Airlines. 

Interspersed vintage black-and-white sketches give a flavor of the High Classic Jet Age, while an in-page advert feature's the airlines cargo operations. 

Surinam Airways Network, 2010-2012

As vintage as this map may seem graphically, the A340 was only acquired by Surinam Airways in November 2009, so the image must be relatively recent. From its base at Paramaribo, the state carrier flies up and down the brow of South America, from Belem in Brazil and up into the West Indies, linking Port of Spain with the Dutch-associated Aruba and Curaçao, but surprisingly not Bonaire. The Caribbean connection finally terminates at Miami, from where, the map indicates, other airlines connect to unspecified American cities.

Barbados, as well as Georgetown, Guyana, and Cayenne, French Guiana, are all shown but seemly not part of the system.

Quite apart from this regional spread is the airline's pride of service, for which the diminutive carrier has employed wide body jumbos and quad-engined Airbuses: the trans-Atlantic span to the seat of the former colonial power: Amsterdam. Weekly flights run nonstop to Schiphol.

BWIA: Caribbean Network, 1967.

A luscious vintage brochure from British West Indian Airways from 1967, when Barbados and Trinidad were in their first years of independence, and Antigua and other islands were still colonies of the crown.

Ruler-sharp red lines span the Windward Islands, connecting each to Barbados, with its direct service to both Georgetown and New York. Several straight lines terminate at Port-of-Spain to stretch across the brow of South America.

A dense web of island-hopping services across the Leewards includes Beef Island off of Tortola, with a number of lines ending at San Juan. Trans-ocean routes from Antigua branch off toward New York JFK and Miami, with a planned pan-Atlantic route to London Heathrow just in planning, "subject to government approval" (it was soon authorized). BWIA enjoyed decades of glory before sadly coming to an end on the last day of 2006, remade as Caribbean Airlines.

British Airways, Latin America & the Caribbean, 1999

Other than its small colonial outposts, which lie within the Caribbean basin between Belize, the Bahamas and Barbados, the United Kingdom has little historic connection to Middle and South America. However, British Airways flies to several Latin cities for petroleum and financial connections, as this bland, newspaper photo-copy quality destination map from 1999 shows.