Qantas: FFC Sydney to London via Mexico, 28 November 1964

 Having concluded November with an Olympic Kangaroo Stretch from Athens to Australia, we continue in December to span the globe with an Antipodean effort: the incredibly unique Qantas round-the-world Sydney to London service via Mexico City, commonly called the"Fiesta Route."

The Timetablist has actually featured a  March 1973 version of this highly unusual routing before, with its stops in "Fiji" and "Tahiti" (which we here track as Nadi and Papeete, respectively), then S-curving through Mesoamerica (the 1970s version first landed on the black sand beaches of Acapulco) before two Anglo-Caribbean hops at Nassau and then Bermuda. At the time, B707s plied the cross-Ocean service; the route was apparently a victim of the 1970s oil crisis, and the arrival of the B747 made the traditional Trans-Asian spine more logical. 

BOAC: The Speedbird Routes Across the World 1950: #2

Continuign from the previous post, the Speedbird Routes of BOAC touched a surprising number of non-Anglophone cities as they extended south from London to Casablanca, Port Etienne, then Bathurst, Freetown, Takoradi, Accra, and Lagos. A planned route would continue to Kano and cross the center of Africa to Khartoum, where the eastern line extends south to Nairobi and Johannesburg.

Less impressive than its African network are its trans-Atlantic routes, as just two left the home countries from Glasgow and Shannon, met again at Gander, and extended into North America to New York and Montreal. A single route from Baltimore linked Bermuda offshore.

Qantas, Worldwide Network, March 1974. Detail 2: The Kangaroo Routes

A detail of the trans-Asian legs of the Qantas network as of March 1974, from the incredible collection of Flickr user caribb.

Surely Damascus and Tehran have not for decades been regular waystations on the way to Oz, politically difficult as they have been for some time. Likewise the curious presence of Colombo or even Bahrain--as has been previously discussed on these pages, the dominance of Bahrain and Kuwait as a Gulf stopover in previous decades has largely ceded to the booming trio of Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha. In fact, Qantas by-passes the Middle East entirely today, having completely lost out on any traffic to the region from overdominant Emirates.

Equally, Qantas is today only present at London and Frankfurt--is many other European destinations, several of which are here, have been dropped since the 1970s. Really, its only remarkable that travelers accumulated in Athens, Rome or Vienna in significant weekly numbers to support such an Australia-bound service.

Note from the previous post that two lines sprawl out from London, one bound for New York, the other for Bermuda, Nassau, Mexico, and Polynesia.

Timetablist will be dedicating an intermediate period going forward to highlight some of the incredible finds of Flickr user caribb's collection. Timetablist would like to thank caribb (Doug from Montreal) for generously allowing the reuse of these images under creative commons license terms.

Qantas: Worldwide Network, March 1973

Yet another goldmine from the lustrous vein of Flickr user caribb's collection, the next three posts will examine the fold-out global route map of Qantas from its timetable issued 4 March 1973.

Qantas was quite a different operation in these days of the early jet age: aside from a dense weave of antipodean services between Australia and New Zealand, and a web of southeast Asian services, the Australian carrier branched around the globe, with a number of rather curious waystations which aren't on its network today in the Middle East and Europe. These will be examined in more detail in the following two posts.

But surely what is most unusual in the entire system is its secondary round-the-world link: the Australian airline's famous "Fiesta Route." A completely unique routing which began in 1966 with the first of the airline's 747s, spanned the South Pacific at Fiji and Tahiti, then crossed the  rest of the ocean and the equator to reach Acapulco, Mexico, hopping on to Mexico City, the wingéd Kangaroo continued eastward to the British colonies at Nassau and then Bermuda, and transversing the Atlantic to finish at London.

The next two posts will examine this item in more detail.

Timetablist will be dedicating an intermediate period going forward to highlight some of the incredible finds of caribb's collection. Timetablist would like to thank caribb (Doug from Montreal) for generously allowing the reuse of these images under creative commons license terms.

BOAC: Worldwide Routes, 1962

Showing some unusual destinations, such as Brazzaville, Kano, Dakar and Windhoek that are no longer served by successor British Airways.